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Frank Calzon. Posted on Mon, Sep. 16, 2002 in
The Miami Herald.
Add one more issue to the debate about lifting U.S. restrictions on travel
to Cuba: the exploitation of Cuban woman and children.
Earlier this year, researchers at the Protection Project, a human-rights
institute based at Johns Hopkins University, reported: ''Canadian and American
tourists have contributed to a sharp increase in child prostitution and in the
exploitation of women in Cuba.'' A crackdown on sex tourism in Southeast Asia
and the lifting of political restrictions on tourism is contributing to such
increase, the researchers wrote in their report "Human Rights Report on
Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children.''
Prostitution exists in many countries, but Fidel Castro's communist polemics
and repressive controls compound the problem in Cuba.
• Immediately after seizing power, Castro blamed prostitution on
''capitalist oppression'' and American tourists. In his new society, he assured
the Cuban people, prostitution and the ''exploitation of man by man'' would
disappear. Forty years later, the situation is much worse. Not only do Cuban
women and children face exploitation by men, but everyone -- men, women and
children -- also face the ''exploitation of man by man'' as indentured servants
of a government that assigns jobs and housing, sets pay and dictates when and
where Cubans may shop and travel.
• Cuba no longer has a civil society nor does it have a way to build
one. The government owns the media; only if and after Castro himself discovers a
problem can it be reported and commented on, and then it's to blame "the
imperialist monster of the North.''
• Independent organizations, which elsewhere can demand protection for
women and children, don't exist in Cuba. Years ago, Castro was forced to
acknowledge widespread prostitution; he dismissed it offhandedly declaring that
Cuban prostitutes were ''the most highly educated in the world.'' He has denied
the existence of widespread AIDS in the island. He unlikely will acknowledge the
extent of sexual abuse of children; to do so would call into question his
revolution's alleged "special concern for children.''
NO MILK AFTER AGE 7
Even in Havana that ''special concern'' and the revolution's
''achievements'' are no longer taken at face value. This is a country that
suspends the milk ration for children after they turn 7. Parents have little or
no say about state-run schools or the enrollment of their high-school age
children in the work-study programs that send teenagers to distant rural
communities to work on government-owned farms. Pope John Paul II described this
forced separation of families as ''traumatic'' and warned against the ''profound
and negative'' effects of increased vulgarity and promiscuity and a lack of
ethics. Teens begin having sexual relations in these camps and have easy access
to abortions.
The Protection Project's report notes that Cuba has signed numerous
international conventions, but "has not ratified the [International Labor
Organization]
Convention
to Eliminate the Worst Forms of Child Labor and not signed the U.N.
Protocol
to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and
Children.''
Public perceptions of Cuba take a while to catch up with realities there. In
1996, the University of Leicester published a report entitled ''Child
Prostitution and Sex Tourism: Cuba,'' based on in-depth interviews conducted by
two British sociologists in Cuba. The report found that "most of the child
sexual exploitation that does take place in Cuba is perpetrated by tourists.''
But should the U.S. Congress act as blindly and callously as it debates
lifting all restrictions on travel to Cuba? Those asserting that unrestricted,
no-questions-asked U.S. tourism will help the Cuban people -- not enrich the
repressive, exploitive Castro government -- would be somewhat more persuasive if
they coupled their courtesy toward Cuba's dictator with demands to end the
unspeakable outrages that Castro foists and fosters on Cubans.
Frank Calzón is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba
in Washington, D.C. | 
