The fall of Saddam Hussein and his East German-trained secret police apparatus was the one clearly good thing to come out of the war on Iraq. But while jubilant Iraqis celebrated the end of Saddam’s tyranny half a world away, Fidel Castro was conducting a ruthless crackdown on internal dissent, untroubled by the possibility that his regime might go the way of Saddam’s.

With U.S. and world attention focused on Iraq, Fidel Castro figured it was the opportune time to take action against his most nettlesome foes. On March 18th, Castro’s secret police launched a series of sweeps across Cuba, arresting physicians, journalists, poets, authors, teachers, photographers, and human rights activists who had dared to speak out against the dictator’s murderous regime and to advocate freedom for all Cubans.

In an April 1st op-ed in the Boston Globe, Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights, described Castro’s Gestapo assault on an independent medical clinic in the town of Pedro Betancourt, 150 kilometers east of Havana:

Over 150 officers and paramilitaries searched and ransacked the private home of Miguel Sigler Amaya and his wife Josefa López Peña, where the clinic was housed, confiscating 90 pounds of medicines: antibiotics, pain killers and vitamins. Police also seized a metered dose inhaler, an oxygen delivery system, a glucometer, some physiotherapy equipment, parental infusion appliances and topical applications. The family’s own medications were confiscated too.

The operation was carried out in front of small children and their 71 year old grandmother, Gloria Amaya, who was later hospitalized with a heart attack. Her two other sons (also dissidents) were detained as well.

Around 80 opposition leaders and peaceful activists, including 27 independent journalists, were arrested in the roundup, Castro’s most brazen crackdown in decades. In closed trials, the arrested “criminals” were charged under Article 91 of the Penal Code for acting against “the independence or the territorial integrity of the State.” Some of the accused were also charged with violating Law 88, which carries the penalty of 20 years in prison for anyone convicted of supporting, or collaborating with, the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba. According to the Communist regime, the embargo is “aimed at ruining internal order, destabilizing the country and liquidating the socialist state and Cuba’s independence.”

During the first two weeks in April, the arrested freedom advocates were given Cuba’s typical Stalinist trials, without the benefit of independent counsel or the scrutiny of the international press. Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque defended the decision to exclude foreign reporters from the court proceedings, claiming there was not enough room for the reporters in the courtrooms. “If they need information on the trials, they can come to the foreign ministry,” Perez Roque said. U.S. Interests Section Chief James Cason, the top U.S. diplomat in Havana, was also denied access to the trials. Many of the accused were given sentences of 20 years or more for merely speaking against the suffocating repression of Castro’s regime (see the list below).

Cuba’s most famous prisoner of conscience, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet Gonzalez, a physician and president of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, was also tried in tandem with those recently arrested, even though he had already been in custody for months. Dr. Biscet served a three-year sentence in one of Cuba’s notorious maximum security prisons for the “crime” of hanging the Cuban flag upside down to demonstrate the country’s state of distress under Castro’s brutal heel. (See “Christian Convict in Cuba” in our September 25, 2000 issue.) Released from prison on October 31, 2002, he was re-arrested 36 days later, on December 6th, as he was about to meet with other human rights workers.

On April 4th, Dr. Biscet’s wife, Elsa Morejon Hernandez, issued an urgent appeal from Cuba by telephone to friends in America. She requested that religious, political, and civic leaders, together with the international press and human rights organizations, demand the release of her husband and the others recently arrested. Her husband, she noted, is “a man who promotes and carries out peaceful, public and open activities in defense of all human rights, particularly the right to life. His ideals are the only weapons he uses to implement his desire that civil and political rights are respected in Cuba.” But peaceful dissent is not tolerated in Castro’s Communist paradise. Mrs. Biscet describes her husband’s ordeal:

He has been subjected to the physical and psychological mistreatment suffered by all those who oppose the present Cuban regime such as beatings, threats, humiliations, blackmail, intimidating interrogations and incarceration in cells deprived of light, alongside criminally insane individuals and common criminals. On several occasions, State Security has tried to subject him to psychiatric examinations, has pressured him to leave Cuba and has prohibited him from practicing medicine.

On April 10th, Dr. Biscet was sentenced to 25 years in prison. In the midst of these outrageous kangaroo court proceedings, the Cuban regime decided to go further and summarily execute three “terrorist” hijackers. From the information available, it appears that the men may have simply been making a desperate bid for freedom, with no intent to cause any harm. Reportedly wielding a pistol and knives, the men seized a ferryboat and ordered the captain to take them and the craft’s 50 passengers to Florida. Thirty miles into the Florida Straits the boat ran out of fuel, and the Cuban Coast Guard captured and towed them back to Cuba. Although no one was injured in the episode, the three men were summarily tried on Tuesday, April 8th and executed by firing squad on Friday, April 11th.

Castro’s crackdown may prove counterproductive. Although it has taken many leaders of the freedom movement out of circulation, it has also elevated them to “martyr” status and brought harsh condemnation on the Havana regime from a broad spectrum of sources. Liberal-left groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch joined with the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Germany, Canada, the European Union, and even the French Communist Party to condemn Castro’s recent indefensible actions. “Never before has Castro received such widespread condemnation internationally,” Ariel Remos told The New American. Remos, a senior writer for the Cuban-American newspaper Diario Las Americas in Miami, added: “It has been a complete public relations negative for Castro, the biggest he has ever suffered. It shows that he is very desperate about maintaining his power, containing the growing opposition and suppressing the Cuban peoples’ yearning for freedom.”

But the Bush administration and its interventionist supporters in Congress and the media who are so hawkish on using U.S. military power to depose dictators in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, and other countries thousands of miles from home become suddenly dovish and isolationist when it comes to the terrorist chief 90 miles from our shores. Asked by Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press, on Sunday, April 13th, if in view of Castro’s recent despotic action, the U.S. might consider targeting his regime, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offered an odd response. He conceded that the plight of the Cuban people under Castro is “sad” and “unfortunate.” “But the American people, for the most part,” he opined, “are people who want to go about their business, and we recognize we can’t try to make everyone in the world be like we are.” According to Rumsfeld, “we recognize in a complicated world that there are countries that live differently. And so it isn’t a matter for the United States to try to have everyone else be like us.”

Heroes Behind Bars

The following journalists and dissidents have been imprisoned by Castro.

Independent Journalists
• Víctor Rolando Arroyo: 26 years
• Pedro Argüelles Morán: 20 years
• Majail Bárzaga Lugo: 15 years
• Carmelo Díaz Fernández: 15 years
• Oscar Espinosa Chepe: 20 years
• Adolfo Fernández Saínz: 15 years
• Miguel Galván Gutiérrez: 26 years
• Julio César Gálvez: 15 years
• Edel José García: 15 years
• Roberto García Cabrejas
• Jorge Luis García Paneque: 24 years
• Ricardo González Alfonso: 20 years
• Luis González Pentón: 20 years
• Alejandro González Raga
• Normando Hernández: 25 years
• Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta: 20 years
• José Ubaldo Izquierdo: 16 years
• Héctor Maseda: 20 years
• Mario Enrique Mayo: 20 years
• Jorge Olivera: 18 years
• Pablo Pacheco Avila: 20 years
• Fabio Prieto Llorente: 20 years
• José Gabriel Ramón Castillo
• Raúl Rivero Castañeda: 20 years
• Omar Rodríguez Saludes: 27 years
• Omar Ruiz Hernández: 18 years
• Manuel Vázquez Portal: 18 years

Peaceful Opponents
• Osvaldo Alfonso: 18 years
• Nelson Aguilar: 13 years
• Pedro Pablo Alvarez Ramos: 25 years
• Rafael Ernesto Avila Pérez
• Margarito Broche Espinosa: 25 years
• Marcelo Cano: 18 years
• Eduardo Díaz Fleites: 21 years
• Antonio Díaz Sánchez: 20 years
• Alfredo Domínguez Batista
• Efrén Fernández: 12 years
• José Daniel Ferrer Castillo
• Luis Enrique Ferrer García: 28 years
• Orlando Fundora
• Alfredo Felipe Fuentes: 26 years
• Próspero Gainza: 25 years
• Javier García Pérez
• Diosdado González Marrero
• Léster González Pentón: 20 years
• Jorge Luis González Tanquero: 20 years
• Leonel Grave de Peralta
• Iván Hernández Carrillo
• Regis Iglesias: 18 years
• Rolando Jiménez Posada
• Reynaldo Labrada Peña: 6 years
• Librado Linares: 20 years
• Marcelo López Bañobre: 15 years
• José Miguel Martínez Hernández
• Rafael Mollet
• Luis Milán Fernández
• Roberto de Miranda: 20 years
• Nelson Molinet: 20 years
• Angel Moya Acosta
• Jesús Mustafá Felipe
• Félix Navarro
• Héctor Palacios Ruiz: 25 years
• Arturo Pérez de Alejo: 20 years
• Omar Pernet Hernández: 25 years
• Horacio Julio Piña Borrego: 20 years
• Alfredo Pulido: 14 years
• Arnaldo Ramos Laubiriquet
• Alexis Rodríguez Fernández
• Blas G. Rodríguez Reyes: 25 years
• Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello: 20 years
• Claro Sánchez Altarriba
• Ariel Sigler Amaya
• Guido Sigler Amaya
• Miguel Sigler Amaya
• Ricardo Silva Gual
• Fidel Suárez Cruz: 20 years
• Manuel Ubals González
• Julio Antonio Valdés Guerra: 20 years
• Miguel Valdés Tamayo
• Héctor Raúl Valle Hernández: 12 years
• Antonio A. Villarreal Acosta: 15 years
• Orlando Zapata Tamayo

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