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Castro is increasingly
isolated
Charleston
Post Courier,
SC. Tuesday, May 4, 2004.
Hundreds of thousands of Cubans were obliged
to provide a mass audience for Fidel Castro
as usual on May 1 in Havana, still a red-letter
day on the Communist Party calendar, but
celebrated by fewer people and with less
fervency. This year the Cuban dictator increased
his isolation by including in his two-hour
harangue insults that prompted Mexican President
Vicente Fox and Peruvian President Alejandro
Toledo to withdraw their ambassadors.
Castro was incensed because Mexico and
Peru joined 20 other nations in voting to
condemn his regime before the U.N. Human
Rights Commission for denying Cubans freedom
and for repressing all forms of dissent
on the island.
Charges that Castro is a gross violator
of human rights are getting under the skin
of the 77-year-old tyrant. Castro bitterly
denounced the U.N. Human Rights Commission
vote, accusing the United States of forcing
other nations to support the resolution.
He turned on the United States, charging
that the Guantanamo Naval Base prison camp
is "one of the most grotesque cases
of human rights violations." Then he
attacked the European Union and Latin American
nations that have criticized his human rights
record, calling them a "herd of hypocrites."
With the loss of Mexico, long a supporter
of Castro, only Venezuela remains aligned
with Havana. And Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez is fighting a petition drive to force
his recall by a referendum.
World opinion has been slow to react forcefully
against Castro's totalitarian police state.
For more than four decades, Castro managed
to hide Cuban reality, but the collapse
of Soviet Communism has left the dictator
virtually friendless. His crackdown on the
pro-democracy movement over the past year,
jailing 85 dissidents for terms up to 28
years, and the summary execution of two
Cubans who attempted to hijack a ferry boat
to flee to Florida, has awakened the sleeping
conscience of the international community.
Three days after Castro postured in Revolution
Square, one of Cuba's best-known jailed
dissidents, journalist/poet Raul Rivero,
was awarded the UNESCO Press Freedom Award
in Belgrade. His wife, Blanca, was prevented
from traveling to receive the prize. As
she told The Miami Herald, "My husband
is in a small cell and I'm in a large one."
Copyright © 2004, The Post and Courier,
All Rights Reserved.
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