By Laurie Goering. Tribune Staff Writer. Chicago Tribune. May 17, 2000
Over the past five days, two of Cuba's best-known political dissidents have walked out of jail and a third may join them soon, a development they attribute to international political pressure on Cuba to improve its human-rights practices.
The releases are seen as a concession to critics, rather than a dramatic shift in policy. Granma, the island's government-run newspaper, made no mention Tuesday of the releases, and government officials had no comment.
Nonetheless, the grudging concession was seen as a positive step for the estimated 350 political opponents jailed in Cuba for speaking out against the government and other acts not considered crimes in most nations. "We're very excited, and we are going to continue to work in the same
direction," promised Marta Beatriz Roque, one of activists, who was freed Monday night after being jailed since July 1997 for pushing for democratic reforms in Cuba.
In a telephone interview, the economist thanked foreign nations for keeping a focus on Cuba's human-rights situation, saying that pressure had been "very effective in [bringing about] this news."
Roque's surprise release, just a few hours short of her 55th birthday, followed the release Friday of Felix Bonne, 60, a former physics professor and another of the so-called Group of Four dissidents.
The four last year were sentenced to terms of 31/2 to 5 years in prison for incitement to sedition after they released a treatise titled "The Fatherland Belongs to All." The document calls for free elections in Cuba and suggests the island's government is focused primarily on holding
on to power.
Since their arrests, the four have been a focal point for human-rights criticisms of Fidel Castro's government, with a host of international rights groups and political leaders from Pope John Paul II to Illinois Gov. George Ryan pushing for their release.
"The Cuban government never wants to acknowledge that it responds to pressure, and it doesn't usually act right away," said Uva de Aragon, associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. "But I think in the end the pressure worked in this
case."
The releases come after a string of human-rights rebukes for Cuba. Last month, the United Nations human-rights commission voted in Geneva to condemn the island for its rights record. Canada and the European Union, Cuba's closest trading partners, also have stepped up their criticism of Castro's
regime in recent months.
In November, the island's human-rights failings also became the unintentional focus of the international Ibero-American Summit, held in Havana. Cuba's government had hoped to use the meeting to emphasize the island's waning isolation; instead, visiting heads of state stole the spotlight by
holding a series of high-profile meetings with opposition leaders.
Embarrassed and angry, Cuba's government has since stepped up low-level harassment of dissidents, detaining or restricting the movement of nearly 600 political opponents since November, though long-term arrests have fallen off, said Elizardo Sanchez, head of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights
and National Reconciliation.
The new dissident releases are "very good news," Sanchez said, but he warned that the move does not represent any important softening in the communist government's policy toward opponents.
"The government isn't thinking at all of starting democratic reforms," he said.
Speaking by telephone from her apartment in Havana, Roque predicted that lawyer Rene Gomez, a third member of the Group of Four, would be released as early as this week. Gomez, Roque and Bonne had all enjoyed several weekends at home since the start of the year, an apparent prelude to their
releases.
The fourth dissident, Vladamiro Roca, was not expected to be freed. Roca, an ex-fighter pilot in Cuba's military and the son of a member of the Cuban Communist Party's inner circle, has been kept in solitary confinement for almost three years, charged Sanchez, Cuba's leading human-rights
advocate.
"The government has been especially tough with him," Sanchez said.
Like the others, he said, Roca has served enough of his sentence to be eligible for release under Cuban law, but Roca's high profile and leadership position in the group makes that unlikely.
Roque said her release late Monday came as a surprise. Shortly after 6:15 p.m., she said, she was called to the prison's main office and handed a white sheet of paper.
"`Do you know what this is?' they asked me, and I said, `No, I don't know what this is,'" Roque said. "They said, `This is your release.'"
"It was a very good birthday present," she said.
Specifically, she and Bonne were freed under a conditional release that sets some limits on their rights outside jail, including where they can work, Roque said.
She said that she and others in the group remain committed to pressuring Castro's regime for greater political freedom and that jail had only given them time refine their ideas.
"Now we are more mature. We had time to think and reflect," she said.
Roque said she believed the releases had come in part because the Cuban government is embroiled in battles with most of its allies and neighbors and needs to find a way to soften growing criticism.
Relations with Canada have soured since a Cuban envoy to the United States was ejected earlier this year in connection with a spy case. The man promptly flew to Canada and eventually had to be forcibly expelled.
Cuba's government denies that it holds any political prisoners, characterizing detainees instead as common criminals or "counterrevolutionaries" backed by Cuban political exiles in Miami.
U.S. analysts said they believe the releases also amount to a peace offering to the U.S., which has cooperated with Cuba on returning shipwrecked Elian Gonzalez to the island and is now discussing easing the nearly 40-year economic embargo against the island to allow sales of food and medicine.
"U.S. public opinion and the U.S. administration have been pretty evenhanded in the handling of the Elian situation. Perhaps they're saying, `Let's extend an olive branch,'" speculated Max Castro, a Cuba expert at the University of Miami.
With the Gonzalez case having pushed Cuba firmly into the spotlight in the U.S., "releasing people is going to be noted more now than at other times," he said. "They would be smart to start a lot of moves like this." |