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Rafael Diaz-Balart's long
fight for Cuba
By Kathryn Lopez. Jewish
World Review, May 17, 2005.
That's the image many Westerners have of
Fidel Castro. Oliver Stone has called the
dictator "one of the Earth's wisest
people." Other media moguls, actors
and intellectuals have traveled to Havana
to pay homage and make small talk about
cigars.
Hollywood's affection for Fidel makes him
as chic as a Che Guevara T-shirt (a hot
item with the U.S. college set). Che, by
the way, despite his current "Motorcycle
Diaries" stud-icon status, was Castro's
executioner in the younger days of the Castro
regime - a thug who would do the despot's
dirty work.
But don't try to sell that harmless-old-revolutionary
spin to a Cuban. Fidel Castro is no cuddly
papa to those who know his brutality all
too well. A recent Freedom House tally declared
Cuba's government as one of the most repressive
on the planet.
As Florida Republican congressman Lincoln
Diaz-Balart once said, "For the life
of me, I just don't know how Castro can
seem cute after 40 years of torturing people."
Castro not only tortures and executes, he
also holds a special disdain for blacks
and gays, which is why much of Cuba's dissident
movement is black.
Diaz-Balart's father, Rafael, who died
earlier this month at age 79, knew well
the repressive reality of Castro's Cuba.
He went from being a close friend of Castro
in their younger days to becoming one of
the tyrant's political headaches. Rafael's
legacy includes not one, but two sons in
U.S. Congress.
The late Rafael was, for a time, Fidel
Castro's brother-in-law, when his sister
Mirta Diaz-Balart married the dictator in
the days before he seized power. Once Castro's
best friend - Rafael introduced the couple
(talk about regrets) - the marriage lasted
only two years, during which Rafael's sister
Mirta bore Castro his first son. But the
Diaz-Balarts would all fall out of favor,
and by the time Castro was in charge, the
Diaz-Balart family was as good as dead on
Cuban soil.
Rafael, as majority leader of the Cuban
house of representatives in 1955, opposed
amnesty for a jailed Castro, predicting
"mourning, pain, bloodshed and misery"
for the Cuban people if Castro was released.
The Diaz-Balarts were out of the country
when Castro took over and after Castro burned
their house to the ground they never returned,
getting that message loud and clear. Living
in Florida, Rafael was a leader of the Castro
opposition, and taught his sons to love
freedom through word and deed.
The commitment runs so deep in the Diaz-Balart
blood that speaking of their Cuba and other
tyrannies, like China, Lincoln said in a
2003 interview with the National Review:
"I feel almost embarrassed for the
human race that we just sit here and accept
regimes like that."
As members of Congress (Lincoln was elected
in 1992, Mario in 2002), the sons have helped
form a new bipartisan, bicameral Cuba Democracy
Caucus in Congress, "to promote discussion
and proactive policymaking in order to hasten
Cuba's transition, Cuba's change to a free
and democratic society."
So far, eight senators and 17 congressmen
from 10 states have signed up. On the top
of their to-do list is reaching out to Cuba's
pro-democracy movement, strengthening its
independent media, and opposing U.S. legislation
that would ease trade and tourism embargos
on the authoritarian regime.
As the United States has stepped up efforts
to penetrate beyond our station at Guantanamo
Bay, pamphlets including translations of
President Bush's second inaugural address
have been making the rounds in Cuba. In
January, Bush said, "Democratic reformers
facing repression, prison or exile can know:
America sees you for who you are: the future
leaders of your free country."
It's a tough fight, but not without its
hopes. In recent years, even old allies
have called Castro, his stubborn stranglehold
on power and bloodthirsty crackdowns on
dissenters "pathetic." A former
Spanish prime minister, once an ally, said
in 2003, "He is now like Franco when
he was dying."
There have been many reports of the wives,
mothers, daughters and sisters of Cuban
political prisoners in Cuba standing in
public to protest the second-year anniversary
of the imprisonment of 71 prisoners of conscience
- mostly journalists who were thrown in
jail for not toeing the government line
and delivering the canned Castro message.
Illeana Rodriguez Saludes, the wife of
a photographer sentenced to 27 years in
prison, told reporters: "I will not
be silenced. If I were I might as well be
dead." Castro acolytes try to shout
them down whenever they gather to protest,
but the women will not pipe down, mercifully.
There are believed to be some 300 prisoners
of conscience in prison in Cuba, locked
up on vague charges like "dangerousness"
and "disseminating enemy propaganda."
Lincoln recently said of his father, "His
death constitutes another reason to continue
the fight for Cuba's freedom, which was
the ideal of his life, and of so many Cubans
who have died longing for free Cuba."
The Rafael Lincoln Diaz-Balart legacy,
both in the United States and in his homeland,
will see to it that that message of freedom
spreads in Castro's twilight.
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