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Gordon Barthos. The
Toronto Star, Canada. Jun. 19, 2003. 01:00 AM
Carlos Fernandez de Cossio must be the unluckiest diplomat in Ottawa.
He's Cuba's ambassador.
And the very day he presented his credentials, in 1999, Canada-Cuba
relations tanked as President Fidel Castro jailed four prominent dissidents.
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien put "northern frost" on
relations for three years until their release.
Now Castro has just jailed 75 more, including 27 journalists.
Cuban officials brand them enemies of the state. In a way they are. They
support the Varela Project, which demands a plebiscite on allowing:
- Freedom of political association, expression and the press.
- Amnesty for political prisoners.
- Private enterprise.
- Free elections.
But they are peaceful advocates of change, not guerrillas.
Appalled by the jailings, Chrétien is once again scaling back
contacts with Cuban officials and ramping up contacts with dissidents.
Fernandez de Cossio has the thankless job of trying to mitigate the damage.
And he tries.
Cubans are free to openly disagree with the regime, he says. Many do. But
the 75 are criminals, not dissidents.
Most were jailed after brisk closed-door trials. They were convicted of
working with Washington to subvert "the independence or territorial
integrity of the state." Some Cubans liken them, improbably, to the Front
de Libération du Québec terrorists. They got up to 28 years.
While some were no doubt funded by Washington, which gives $7 million a year
to reformers, Amnesty International regards them as prisoners of conscience, not
mercenaries. Their "crime" was working with foreigners to promote
democracy, press freedom and rights.
But "these are tense times for Cuba" in the post 9/11,
post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq climate, Fernandez de Cossio told a skeptical clutch
of Star editors this week. "We're threatened by the United States. A
country that has suffered 44 years of aggression has reason to feel threatened."
In Miami, Cuban exiles have shouted Iraq now, Cuba next, at demonstrations.
U.S. President George Bush is "obsessed" with fomenting opposition
to Castro, de Cossio said.
Hence the crackdown.
"We in Cuba don't have the luxury of allowing the sole superpower in
the world today to finance an opposition in Cuba that has reason to believe that
an invasion of Cuba could be successful.
"We are trying to build a just society" for Cuba's 11 million
people, he said, echoing Pierre Trudeau's famous slogan. "But we have not
had one day of peace to prove ourselves on a level playing field. Not one day.
"The day we have peace, Cuba will be very different from the way it is
today."
Maybe so. But by jailing dissidents, journalists and human rights activists,
Castro looks less like a revolutionary hero under fire than a practised dictator
who is crushing dissent, while whipping up alarm about a U.S. attack that will
never come. He has cynically played on people's fears. And he struck as the
world was distracted by Iraq.
As Cuba's Catholic prelate Jaime Cardinal Ortega sees it, Cubans are less
threatened by an invasion from Miami, than by a "moral crisis" at
home. While "the Church's mission is not to be the opposition party that
unfortunately does not exist in Cuba," he said in April, "I wish there
were one, two or three different parties, but there are not."
Castro's ruthless quashing of dissent in his twilight years leaves Cuba on
the bad side of history, the last one-party state in the Western Hemisphere.
Castro, now 76, has ruled since 1959. That's long enough. Cuba should not be
a deathbed legacy to his brother Raul. It's not a family estate.
The Varela Project would turn the one-party state on its head.
But Cubans are revolutionaries. They rejected Fulgencio Batista's brutal,
corrupt regime for one that, while unfree and poor, was progressive, honest and
egalitarian by any standard.
If any people have earned the right to build a democratic state and change
their leadership without abandoning their social ideals, Cubans have.
And Castro knows it.
Gordon Barthos writes the Star's editorials on foreign affairs. | 
