The Crackdown in Cuba

Theresa Bond

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2003

Summary:  On the very day U.S. forces entered Iraq last March, Fidel Castro launched a major crackdown on Cuban dissidents; 75 have since been imprisoned. Just why he chose to crush the reformers remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: his country may be crumbling, but the commandante's grip on power remains as tight as ever.

Theresa Bond is the pseudonym for a respected political analyst specializing in closed societies.

Perhaps the most telling interpretation of the crackdown is Castro's own: that it was the action of a David (namely Cuba) confronting the Goliath to the north. An "information note" published by the regime as the roundup began made this notion clear: "A few dozen persons directly linked to the conspiratorial activities led by James Cason [head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana] have been arrested by the relevant authorities and will be brought to trial." Castro used similar language at the end of the trials, in a speech that he opened with the ominous declaration, "It all started with the arrival in Cuba of Mr. Cason." According to Castro, the 75 dissidents had been acting on Washington's orders.

That Castro should be obsessed with the United States is not altogether surprising, given the two countries' shared history. At age 76, moreover, Cuba's president has now been in office for 44 years -- longer than any other head of state except for Queen Elizabeth -- and George W. Bush is the tenth occupant of the White House to confront him. And the recent trials show that Castro's anxiety about American subversion has not diminished over the years. As recently as March 1999, he had enacted a new special law (Law Number 88) punishing the encouragement of U.S. policy, particularly the embargo. "The revolution will apply with the necessary rigor ... the laws created to defend it from new and old tactics and strategies against Cuba," warned the above-mentioned "information note." Indeed, Law 88, which was used to condemn many of the 75 defendants, could be called the Anti-Helms-Burton Act, since it is aimed specifically at those "who support or help to enforce" that legislation. It is now illegal in Cuba to say, write, or do anything that Washington could use against Havana. No wonder that Cuban dissidents refer to it as the Gag Law.

The Helms-Burton Act not only tightened the embargo against Cuba but also pledged money to support a "democratic transition" there. Accordingly, in the years since the act's passage, the U.S. Agency for International Development has provided $22.5 million to promote such a "transition" and to prepare for a Cuba without Castro. Cuba's president has been infuriated both by the act's language and by the behavior of local American diplomats. Vicki Huddleston, Cason's predecessor at the U.S. Interests Section (and now ambassador to Mali), set a defiant tone last year when she started distributing free transistor radios to Cubans. Castro was not amused, and state television denounced the radios' recipients as counterrevolutionaries. Cason, a career diplomat, arrived in Havana in the fall of 2002 and adopted an even more defiant attitude. In February, he visited the home of a dissident and declared to the foreign reporters he had invited to cover the event that Castro was "afraid of free speech" and "of human rights." Both charges were true, but Castro fumed at what he called the "grosería de guapetón con inmunidad diplomática" -- rude behavior by a bully with diplomatic immunity.

The overt support provided by the U.S. mission in Havana to Cuba's opposition proved too much for Castro to bear. Mere support might have been tolerable, but not such open defiance. And to be fair, the American behavior was somewhat conspicuous. In other totalitarian states, from Burma to Zimbabwe, American and other diplomats provide similar assistance to local dissidents, but they do it much more covertly -- so discreetly, in fact, that the programs rarely reach the public eye.

Although U.S. diplomats could have acted in a less ostentatious way, the dissidents themselves had very little choice. It is not easy to prepare for a peaceful transition of government in a country with no fax machines or vcrs for sale and no photocopying facilities, and where a three-minute phone call abroad costs the equivalent of the average monthly salary. Satellite dishes are banned, and listening to foreign radio broadcasts is deemed "subversive." Thus it is hardly surprising that when the U.S. Interests Section opened a sort of Internet cafe for Cuban dissidents last year, the attraction proved irresistible. Many flocked to the site, in a former embassy building on the sea front, to surf the Web -- a forbidden fruit in a country where Internet access cards were previously sold only to tourists (and are now entirely unavailable). Castro, again not amused, was unable to shut down the Internet cafe without closing the entire U.S. Interests Section. So he locked up its users instead. They now enjoy prison visits from family members every three months, instead of Web access every Thursday.

Castro has applied a similar method to undermine the effect of visits by foreign personalities who hoped to use their presence to support local civil society. Private visitors -- Czech officials on nondiplomatic passports, a Swedish politician, and an Argentine journalist -- have been detained and deported, more or less quietly. Official visitors, however, such as Jimmy Carter; Mexico's last foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda; or the heads of state who came for the 1999 Latin American summit, could not be punished themselves, so Castro went after the Cubans that they had met with instead. For example, on March 8, eight visiting members of the U.S. House of Representatives met in a Havana hotel with five local dissidents, two of them accompanied by their wives. Four of the activists were subsequently locked up on sentences ranging from 18 to 26 years, after waiters from the hotel testified against them at their trials.

Prior to the arrests, the Castro regime had for several years been lenient on dissent, luring opponents into a false sense of safety. Activists were led to believe that they had carved out a new space for their work and boasted to visitors that they could now act in the open; after all, there was nothing illegal about what they were doing. Little did they know that their island would soon become the backdrop for Moscow-style show trials resulting in a cumulative sentence of 1,450 years for the 75 defendants.

TRUTH ON TRIAL