Desperation Rises in Castro's
Cuba
By Meghan Clyne - Staff
Reporter of the New
York Sun. November 30, 2005.
WASHINGTON - Amid a surging wave of repression
by the Castro dictatorship, Cuba's prisoners
of conscience increasingly are resorting
to "acts of desperation" - including
hunger strikes, suicide attempts, and self-mutilation
- in a cry for international recognition
and solidarity, and to advance the cause
of the island's liberation.
According to leaders of the Cuban pro-democracy
movement in Havana, Miami, and Washington,
the months since July have witnessed a dramatic
increase in reports of such acts emerging
from Castro's gulag. The prisoners' behavior,
activists said, is a response both to increased
crackdowns outside the prisons and new levels
of abuse inside, and to the perceived indifference
of the international community, particularly
Europe.
"The prisoners are pleading to the
world to pay attention as they work for
liberty," one of Cuba's leading prodemocracy
activists, Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello,
told The New York Sun in Spanish earlier
this week in a telephone interview from
Havana.
Those pleas are taking increasingly gruesome
forms.
Late last month, a lawyer and independent
journalist locked away for more than two
years in the Kilo 7 prison in Camaguey,
Mario Enrique Mayo, demanded freedom from
his jailers by taking a knife to his face
and body. Mr. Mayo was one of 75 dissidents
rounded up by the Castro regime during the
infamous primavera negra, or "black
spring," of March 2003. According to
an account in El Nuevo Herald, Mr. Mayo
has been one of the most vocal of the dissidents
jailed in that crackdown, and, prior to
his acts of self-mutilation last month,
twice attempted suicide in jail by trying
to strangle himself with a plastic cord.
Among his many incisions, Mr. Mayo carved
the letters "I" and "L"
into his forehead, proclaiming that he was
"inocente," or "innocent,"
and demanding "libertad," or "liberty."
According to the Herald report, one of Mr.
Mayo's cuts became badly infected. He remains
in Mr. Castro's dungeons, condemned to a
20-year sentence.
In another act of self-mutilation, a prisoner
of conscience in the Canaleta prison in
Cuba's Ciego de Avila province, Manuel Fiallo,
cut himself to protest prisoners' lack of
medical care, according to a Cuban prison
diary published in recent days on a Miami-based
Cuban pro-democracy site, Payolibre.com.
The diary, signed by another Canaleta prisoner
jailed in November 2004, Hugo Damian Prieto
Blanco, was written and illustrated between
December 2004 and September. In one of September's
entries, Mr. Prieto recounts and depicts
how Mr. Fiallo slashed his veins in protest
and was subsequently thrown into a punishment
cell by prison guards and left to bleed
to death as his screams went ignored by
prison authorities.
The leader of Cuba's Damas de blanco movement,
Laura Pollan Toledo, told the Sun that other
recent examples of those who carried out
self-mutilation included Juan Carlos Herrera
and Prospero Gainza Aguero, two of the 75
primavera negra dissidents. Mr. Herrera,
Ms. Pollan said, has beaten himself repeatedly
in prison to protest the horrible conditions
suffered by detainees. Mr. Gainza, she said,
sewed his mouth closed in an act of protest,
rendering himself unable to speak or eat.
Ms. Pollan's organization, known in America
as the "Ladies in White," has
brought together the wives, mothers, sisters,
and daughters of the prisoners jailed in
the 2003 crackdown for regular demonstrations
to demand their release. The Damas de blanco,
along with the international free speech
organization Reporters Without Borders,
won this year's Andrei Sakharov Prize for
Freedom of Thought, awarded by the European
Parliament, for their efforts to combat
Mr. Castro's tyranny.
Ms. Pollan and the Washington representative
for Reporters Without Borders, Lucie Morillon,
said Cuba has also seen a proliferation
in recent months of hunger strikes among
prisoners, particularly independent journalists.
Concern was mounting yesterday over the
fate of one hunger-striking journalist,
Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, also known as "Atunez,"
as his sister, Berta Atunez, reported that
her brother, who has gone without food for
about 20 days, had disappeared from the
prison where he had been kept and could
not be located.
The hunger strikes, suicide attempts, and
self-mutilation, observers said, were signs
that the conditions both on the island and
in its prisons were worsening; that Mr.
Castro had grown increasingly repressive
as a result of both surging domestic discontent
and his backing from Venezuela's president,
Hugo Chavez; and that recent international
appeasement of Mr. Castro had signaled to
Cuba's dissidents that they would need to
intensify their cries for them to be heard
by deaf international ears.
Ms. Roque told the Sun that the changes
in prisoner behavior began around the time
of Mr. Castro's annual address to the nation
on the anniversary of his Communist revolution,
July 26. In preceding weeks, Mr. Castro
had orchestrated the largest crackdown since
the March 2003 roundup, arresting more than
30 democracy activists on July 22, many
of whom still remain in prison.
The roundup came on the heels of the island's
largest pro-democracy gathering under the
Castro dictatorship, a May 20 gathering
of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society
in Cuba, of which Ms. Roque was one of the
principal organizers. That meeting, along
with July protests outside the French embassy,
marked an increase in open opposition to
Mr. Castro's stranglehold on power, and
Ms. Roque said it was fear and a recognition
of his loosening grip that had provoked
Mr. Castro's crackdowns.
Ms. Morillon said the Castro regime has
arrested at least one independent journalist
a month over the last six months, with a
total of 25 journalists now languishing
in the dictator's gulag. That figure, according
to Reporters Without Borders, makes Cuba
"the second biggest prison for journalists
in the world," Ms. Morillon said. Communist
China is the first, with 31 jailed journalists.
Cuba's population is 11 million. Communist
China's is 1.3 billion.
These abuses, Ms. Roque said, "Are
simply because the government knows it is
in an untenable situation," adding
that the Castro regime saw itself as suffering
from a "terminal illness." The
crackdowns on dissidents, Ms. Roque said,
had been matched by an increase in brutality
inside the prisons to which they are condemned.
Ms. Pollan, reached by telephone at her
home in Havana, said prisoners' acts of
desperation were also driven by horrifying
conditions inside the jails.
Owing to the large number of prisoners
of conscience - which Ms. Pollan said numbered
over 1,000 - space in Cuban jails is cramped.
The Cuban population in general, she said,
has been suffering from inadequate nutrition,
stemming from a recent scarcity of fruit
and vegetables. Prisoners, she said, bear
the worst of the shortages, and are growing
ill as a result.
Fruits and vegetables are an important
source of Vitamin A, and Ms. Pollan said
Vitamin A deficiency among Cuban prisoners
is causing blindness and other eyesight
problems. Water for drinking and bathing,
too, is scarce in the jails. A lack of medical
attention for ill prisoners is also presenting
an urgent problem, which Ms. Morillon noted
was ironic in a country that touts its "universal
health care."
According to Ms. Morillon, the situation
in the jails is particularly harsh for journalists
and other prisoners of conscience. The Castro
regime, she said, detains prisoners of conscience
among "regular thugs, who are usually
asked by prison authorities to harass the
journalists."
Beyond protesting worsening conditions
inside the dungeons, Ms. Pollan said the
hunger strikes and similar behavior were
also acts of defiance against the regime,
with prisoners showing their contempt for
their jailers using the only methods available
to them.
That method of resistance against Communist
brutality has a long history. Americans
are likely most familiar with the case of
Vietnam war hero James Stockdale. Admiral
Stockdale's Medal of Honor citation recounts
that he resisted his communist captors in
Hanoi by mutilating his face by beating
it with a wooden stool, undertaking "self-disfiguration
to dissuade his captors from exploiting
him for propaganda purposes." Stockdale,
according to the citation, inflicted "a
near-mortal wound to his person in order
to convince his captors of his willingness
to give up his life rather than capitulate,"
which spared his fellow prisoners further
torture.
According to Ms. Pollan and Cuban-American
leaders in Congress, the Cuban prisoners'
self-mutilation represents similarly courageous
acts of resistance against their Communist
captors.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican
of Florida, said the prisoners' recent actions
"show their willingness to sacrifice
their own lives for the greater cause of
freedom and democracy for their nation and
their people."
"Cuba's internal opposition,"
the congresswoman added, "is fully
aware that they were born free and that
no one is entitled to deny them their inalienable
human rights. This is why I believe that
the psychological transition from an enslaved
people to a free people has begun."
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican
of Florida, praised the prisoners, adding
that their acts were "a sign of desperation,
a cry for solidarity, and for recognition
of the reality" of the Cuban gulag.
Moreover, Mr. Diaz-Balart said, the prisoners'
acts were "a denunciation of the indifference,
which really becomes complicity." The
willful ignorance of Cuba's suffering under
the Castro regime by the press and the international
community, and their romanticizing of the
dictator, amounted to abetting the Castro
dictatorship, the congressman said.
Mr. Diaz-Balart cited Europe in particular,
saying the continent's appeasement of Mr.
Castro and their rejection of dissidents
in recent months had fueled a sense of desperation
among Cuba's prisoners.
In June, the European Union decided to
extend its policy of not inviting Cuban
dissidents to official national day celebrations
at EU countries' embassies in Havana, as
the inclusion of dissidents had greatly
irked the dictator. The July crackdowns
by the Castro regime were responses to dissidents'
protests outside the French embassy, after
the country unilaterally normalized relations
with Mr. Castro's regime, and after Mr.
Castro's foreign minister, Felipe Perez
Roque, was invited to the embassy's July
14 Bastille Day celebration, from which
the Cuban opposition was excluded. And Cuba
resolutions adopted at the Ibero-American
summit in Spain in October were generally
seen as a blow to the Cuban opposition and
accommodating of Mr. Castro.
Activists yesterday said yesterday that
the desperation of the Cuban prisoners'
pleas made it all the more important that
such indifference end immediately.
Ms. Morillon called on the EU to step up
its demands for the release of jailed journalists,
saying it was up to the outside world to
show solidarity with the hunger strikers.
"We should not let them down,"
Ms. Morillon said. If there is outside criticism
of and pressure on the Castro regime, she
said, the prisoners "will know that
there is some interest - they will see that
what they went to prison for is not in vain."
Ms. Pollan, too, said it was incumbent
on the international community to respond
to the prisoners' cries for support with
expressions of solidarity. She encouraged
concerned parties around the world to write
letters to the Castro regime demanding the
dissidents' release, and urged world leaders
to use their speeches and other public appearances
to denounce Mr. Castro's tyranny and demand
the liberation of his captives.
"They need to know that the world
is clamoring for their freedom," she
said.
A message left at the Cuban U.N. mission
in New York seeking comment on the prisoners'
plights went unreturned.
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