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.

At his trial, the prosecution declared that Rivero had set up "a counterrevolutionary group" and "followed orders from the United States government." His indictment was based more on adjectives than on reference to law, however: he was charged with "carrying out subversive activities," "writing subversive articles," "launching a subversive magazine," working for a subversive French agency (Reporters Sans Frontiéres), and sitting "on a jury that promoted a book with subversive ideas."

Rivero is a playful man, so he must have smiled when he read the description of him in the indictment: "he frequents the company of antisocials with whom he exchanges mutual negative influences, he has rude opinions about the revolutionary process, he ignores official warnings, he is provocative, and he disrespects the norms of social coexistence." A Russian speaker and a connoisseur of Soviet literature, Rivero admires the poetry of gulag inmate Joseph Brodsky and is an avid reader of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who famously described waiting for 17 months outside the Leningrad prison where her son was being held. Now Rivero himself has become a poet sent to the gulag for the crime of writing the truth.

AN INSIDE JOB

At Rivero's trial, the prosecution presented two secret agents to testify against him. One, code-named "Miguel," had been president of Cuba's Independent Journalists' Cooperative. The other, the 82-year-old "Octavio," claimed he had been an agent for 40 years and spent the last 10 posing as a journalist -- a claim that, if true, would make him the dean both of Cuba's journalists and its spies.

Of course, since almost all of Cuba's independent journalists published under their real names, there was little for the government's agents to "uncover," and they were limited to recording the amounts of money ($15 to $20) that Web sites paid to writers for their stories. Still, the spies (a dozen in total) managed to do substantial damage. Some provoked splits in the groups they penetrated, whereas others artificially multiplied the number of so-called independent organizations, thereby diluting the impact of the genuine ones and helping to discredit civil society. For example, "Agent Tania" headed a group she created called the Human Rights Party -- a splinter of a genuine group with the same name (the original group had to add "affiliated with the Andrei Sakharov Foundation" to its name in order to differentiate itself). Incidentally, the head of the real Human Rights Party, Rene Montes de Oca, has been imprisoned since 2000, and the man who replaced him, Emilio Leyva Perez, has been held without trial since February 2002. As one of the few independent journalists still at large commented recently, "there are times in the life of a nation when the only place a decent man can find himself is in prison." Today seems to be one of those times.

The crackdown was particularly damaging to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, which lost two researchers who had monitored political prisoners in the country before being locked up themselves. One of these new inmates is Marcelo López Bañobre, a former tugboat captain who joined the commission in outrage after the military sank a fleeing tugboat in 1994, drowning 37 people. He was later particularly active in opposing the death penalty. López's indictment (he was sentenced to 15 years) reads like a nomination for a human rights award: "while doing the monitoring [of the violations] he approached families of [prisoners] suggesting to them that they contact international organizations." His last act as a free man was to compile and distribute, on behalf of the commission, a list of the 75 people then detained -- before becoming number 76 the next day.

The other captive researcher from the Cuban Commission for Human Rights is Marcelo Cano Rodríguez, a doctor who was given an 18-year sentence for "proselytizing activities in the health sector" -- that is, distributing medicine to political prisoners and their families. Cano had founded the Cuban Association of Physicians, which is probably how he provoked Castro's ire, since health care was meant to be one of the government's showcases, and Cano, by proving that the system was broken, had spoiled the picture.

During the crackdown, four other physicians were thrown behind bars, and several independent clinics were ransacked by state security agents. Ninety pounds of medicines were confiscated in one clinic alone, including antibiotics, pain killers, and vitamins, along with medical equipment such as a metered dose inhaler, an oxygen delivery system, and a glucometer. As with the human rights movement, the government tried to discredit genuine medical groups; a physician and agent code-named "Ernesto" founded a front group called the Independent Cuban Association of Physicians to do just that.