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.

The recent crackdown has left Cuba's most courageous civil-society activists in jail for decades (three others arrested in the same roundup are still awaiting trial). Of the half-dozen or so known dissidents left free, most are either burned out after years of struggle or have only recently been released from jail themselves and are thus unwilling to push their luck. Several have made statements that have been publicized abroad or have given interviews to foreign media, but few will go further than that.

Those behind bars come from all races and walks of life: Catholics and Freemasons, intellectuals and peasants. Some are only in their twenties; others are in their sixties. Less than half of the prisoners lived in Havana -- proof that their cause represents not an elite occupation but a broader movement, albeit one now decapitated.

Some of the dissidents were nabbed for following the classic curriculum of nonviolent resistance in communist countries: human rights education and monitoring or the organization of illegal trade unions and political parties. A lay Catholic group had revived an old idea: petition signing. Other activists had embarked on more novel ventures, such as the establishment of independent libraries. Begun five years ago as a single bookshelf in the home of a brave couple in the eastern town of Las Tunas (the two have since fled into exile as a result of unbearable government harassment), this movement now represents approximately 80 book collections around the country.

From the regime's perspective, the most threatening dissidents were probably the independent journalists: both professional reporters and those who merely wrote about subjects that interested them. This latter category included economists, engineers, peasants, physicians, teachers, and trade-union activists. What is known as "Cuban independent journalism" began back in the 1980s, when Miami-based radio stations started conducting telephone interviews with free-minded people living on the island. Then, in the mid-1990s, once direct-dial calling had been established between the United States and Cuba, a few dozen journalists formed themselves into eight "press agencies."

Over the last ten years, many of these journalists have emigrated, and they now aid their colleagues from abroad. The work of those who remain in Cuba is published on Web sites such as CubaNet and Nueva Prensa Cubana, which are operated by Cubans in Miami, or Encuentro, run from Madrid.

Because these Internet sites are blocked in Cuba, most of their readers are members of the Cuban diaspora or are Spanish-speaking Cuba experts. Nonetheless, the publications sometimes manage to find their way to their intended audience. The two Miami-based Web sites produce simple paper editions of their reports that, by ways best left unpublicized, are sent to the island. Many texts are also read or discussed on Miami-based radio stations that broadcast to Cuba.

Just before the crackdown, roughly a hundred Cubans were practicing such independent journalism. Some wrote columns and editorials, but most produced brief, 300-400 word factual reports. They exposed human rights violations (a blind lawyer jailed for civil disobedience being harassed by cellmates or censors restricting rap musicians), publicized the work of activists (hunger strikers demanding the release of political prisoners or dissidents planning an election boycott), and reported on the disastrous crisis in the economy (such as the short supply of milk or the restriction of TV sets to cronies of the regime). Today, less than two dozen remain at large and at work. As that figure suggests, simply reporting the news is a risky business in Cuba. Raúl Rivero, the country's best-known contemporary poet and independent journalist, defiantly wrote in 1999 after the "Gag Law" was passed:

No one, no law will make me believe that I have become a gangster or a criminal because I report the arrest of a dissident, or list the prices of basic food products in Cuba, or write that it is a disaster that more than 20,000 Cubans every year go into exile in the United States and hundreds of others try to go anywhere they can.

In April, however, the government decided that Rivero was just such a gangster. The poet, aged 57, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Once head of the Moscow bureau for Prensa Latina, Cuba's official press agency, Rivero later served as secretary of the Union of Cuban Writers. In 1991, he and nine other intellectuals signed a protest letter to Castro (Rivero is the only signatory who remains in Cuba today). The letter served as the poet's Rubicon; government officials who wanted to switch sides and become dissidents themselves started coming to him, since he was well known and liked from his days inside the regime. In 1995, he founded CubaPress, an independent press agency -- most recently located in two rented rooms of an apartment above a restaurant in Havana's Chinatown. And a few months before he was arrested, Rivero launched a samizdat publication called De Cuba with another writer, Ricardo González (same sentence, different prison). Two hundred copies of the first issue were distributed, although many were subsequently "recalled" by government thugs ransacking dissidents' apartments. The second issue was seized before it reached anyone. And in the homes of Rivero and González, state security agents discovered the tools of their alleged crimes: a radio, a tape recorder, a typewriter, a laptop computer, a video camera adapter, audio and vhs tapes, and a digital battery charger.