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Mission improbable
Cuba and human rights:
Neither American toughness nor a European
charm offensive is likely to persuade Fidel
Castro to reverse his crackdown on dissent
From The
Economist print edition, Mar 23rd 2005.
EVERY Sunday the wives of 75 dissidents
jailed by Cuba's communist government in
2003 put on white clothes and attend mass
at the church of Santa Rita in Miramar,
a once-elegant district of Havana. After
the service, they quietly walk up and down
ten blocks of the avenue outside, before
gathering briefly in a park. On March 18th,
to mark the second anniversary of the heaviest
crackdown by Fidel Castro's regime since
the 1960s, they marched to the offices of
state-run television to demand that it cover
their cause.
These sustained public displays of opposition
are almost unprecedented in a tightly controlled
country. Hitherto, the government has chosen
to ignore them. But on Palm Sunday, the
wives felt the regime's wrath. They were
besieged by 200 members of the government-backed
Cuban Women's Federation, screeching insults,
chanting slogans and waving the national
flag. The previous day a mob had attacked
a dissident supporter.
Human rights
Amnesty International monitors human-rights
abuses in Cuba. The European Union has information
about its relations with the Cuban government.
Two years on, Mr Castro's grip looks stronger
than ever as his government prepares to
fight the annual ritual in which its arch-enemy,
the United States, seeks to have it condemned
by the United Nations Human Rights Commission,
whose sessions began this week in Geneva.
Thanks to help from Venezuela and China,
Cuba's moribund economy is reviving. In
a six-hour speech this month, Mr Castro
claimed that the island is finally "leaving
behind" the "special period"
of penury that followed the collapse of
the Soviet Union, formerly its chief benefactor.
The government has handed out the first
100,000 of a promised 2.5m Chinese-made
electric rice-cookers-whose virtues the
elderly ruler praised for some two hours
of the speech. Electricity shortages will
soon be over, he promised. Thus fortified,
the government has rolled back many of the
timid economic reforms it ordered a decade
ago. Mr Castro has taken to ending public
meetings by singing the "Internationale",
a Marxist anthem.
Cuba's president may also be emboldened
by deepening splits in the way the outside
world deals with him. On the one hand, George
Bush last year announced measures to tighten
the long-standing American trade embargo
against the island. Condoleezza Rice, the
secretary of state, named Cuba as an "outpost
of tyranny" along with the likes of
North Korea and Iran. The administration
has doubled aid to Mr Castro's opponents
and started calling for "regime change"
in Havana. As always, Mr Castro uses a more
aggressive stance from the United States
to rally Cuban nationalism and as a pretext
for repression. Thus, officials label the
dissidents not as a political opposition
(this does not exist, they assert) but as
"mercenaries" in the pay of the
United States.
On the other hand, largely at the behest
of Spain's socialist government, the European
Union has abandoned the tougher stance it
adopted against Cuba when the dissidents
were arrested. This weekend, Louis Michel,
the European commissioner for aid, will
become the most senior EU official to visit
the island since the crackdown. But Mr Castro
offers few prizes to those who promote engagement
with his government. In January, when the
EU announced that it would suspend its diplomatic
sanctions for six months, pending greater
respect for human rights, Mr Castro retorted
that he did not need anyone's pardon for
jailing enemy mercenaries. However, he did
release 14 of the dissidents last year in
the run-up to the EU's decision.
Cuban officials are also comforted by the
advent of a clutch of left-of-centre governments
in Latin America. Many of these may cleave
to market orthodoxy in economics, but satisfy
their traditional supporters by embracing
Mr Castro. Since 1998, the UN resolution
against Cuba has been presented by a Latin
American country. This year, the United
States will itself present it. Cuban officials
see that as a victory. They are pushing
the Europeans to oppose the UN resolution.
In return, they have offered a dialogue
on human rights, a moratorium on the death
penalty and perhaps the release of more
ill prisoners.
Such gestures may persuade the Europeans
to persist with their mission of engagement.
But the harsh reality in Cuba is that the
pro-democracy movement on the island is
tiny, isolated and divided. The lengthy
jail terms, averaging 19 years, imposed
on the dissidents have had a chilling effect.
Cuba's foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque,
refused to condemn last weekend's mob action
against the dissidents' supporters. The
message is clearer than ever: as long as
Mr Castro remains in charge, democracy and
political change are off the agenda.
Copyright
© The Economist Newspaper Limited 2005.
All rights reserved.
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