Published Tuesday, January 16, 2001, in the
Miami Herald
Detentions in Cuba open a bitter divide
Prague demanding release of visitors
By Mimi Whitefield. mwhitefield@herald.com
The bitter political differences between Cuba and the Czech Republic
intensified Monday as Czech Deputy Foreign Minister Hynek Kmonicek presented a
protest note to Cuba's top diplomat in Prague demanding the immediate release of
two prominent Czech citizens detained in Cuba and an explanation for their
arrest.
The detention of the two, a Czech politician and a former dissident student
leader, while on a private visit in Cuba is a telling indication of how rocky
the relationship between Havana and Prague has grown as the countries pursue
different political paths.
Ivan Pilip, a deputy in the Czech Parliament's lower house and a former
finance and education minister, and Jan Bubenik, who was a student leader during
the 1989 Velvet Revolution and is a former deputy, were arrested Friday after a
meeting with two Cuban dissidents in Ciego de Avila, about 185 miles southeast
of Havana.
Their alleged crime: "violating the rules governing foreigners'' who
visit Cuba.
In Prague, the Czech government said it would take all steps within accepted
international standards to secure the men's release.
"This is not a standard situation,'' said Petr Janousek, press attaché
at the Czech embassy in Washington.
The embassy, he said, was monitoring the situation but is not actively
involved in any negotiations.
The incident is unusual because foreigners who run afoul of Cuban
authorities generally are briefly detained and then deported.
NO SIMILAR CASES
"I don't recall a similar case,'' said Frank Calzón, executive
director of the Center for a Free Cuba.
However, he pointed out that foreign diplomats whose views run counter to
Cuban government ideology are often harassed, tailed when they visit dissidents
or menaced by tire slashings.
"The bottom line is, people in Cuba are detained for doing things that
are not considered a crime in almost any country.
"They have so many things in the books that they can always find an
excuse to detain people,'' Calzón said.
The detention "is not in accordance with the principles which the Czech
Republic as well as other democracies stand for,'' the Czech Foreign Ministry
said in a press release.
The ministry said it has had great difficulty getting official information
from Havana and that the men were not allowed to contact the Czech mission in
Havana until Saturday -- despite their pleas to do so.
PRIVATE VISIT
At the time they were arrested, Pilip and Bubenik were on a private visit to
Cuba that was expected to end this week.
Pilip -- co-founder of the Freedom Union, a political party -- has been a
member of the Czech Parliament since 1998. He served as finance minister in
1997-98 and was education minister from 1994 until 1997.
Trained as an economist, he also was a researcher at the Institute of
Sociology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the Prague School of
Economics.
Bubenik was a student leader and spokesman during the Velvet Revolution
while in medical school.
At the age of 21, he was elected as the youngest member of the first
post-Communist parliament in the old Czechoslovakia in 1990. He served until
1992.
Now an employee of Korn/Ferry Consulting in Prague, he created his own
nongovernment public organization, or NGO, Spolecnot 89, to organize events
celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
DOWNWARD SPIRAL
By the time Bubenik began serving in parliament, relations between
Czechoslovakia and Cuba were already on a downward spiral.
For years, the Cuban Interests Section in Washington technically operated as
a part of the Czechoslovak Embassy because the United States and Cuba don't have
diplomatic relations.
But Freedom House and the Cuban-American National Foundation lobbied the
government of President Vaclav Havel to drop the representation as a symbolic
gesture, and in December 1990, Havel's government announced the relationship was
over.
CRUCIAL CRITIQUE
Last April, after the Czech Republic and Poland, with support from the
United States, co-sponsored a resolution criticizing Cuba's human rights record
that was approved by the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, the Cuban
government organized a massive protest march past the Czech Embassy in Havana.
The next day Cuban officials accused Czech diplomats of passing cash,
computers, propaganda and other supplies from anti-Castro groups in Florida to
Cuban dissidents.
A Czech foreign ministry spokesman called the allegations "total
nonsense.''
The accusations remain a sore point between the two countries.
But Antonio Femenías, a dissident journalist, said he and Roberto
Valdivia, the other Ciego de Avila dissident and a member of the Cuban Committee
for Human Rights, only talked with the Czechs.
"There was absolutely nothing offered. They talked about the situation
in the country, about the socialist camp, and about perspectives,'' he said.
Femenías and Valdivia were briefly detained and then released.
After Pilip and Bubenik were detained they were transferred to Havana, where
they were in the custody of police who deal with foreigners.
'INCREASING FEAR'Calzón said he interpreted the arrests as a sign
that the Cuban government "is increasingly fearful that what happened in
Eastern Europe could happen in Cuba'' and wants to stop the flow of ideas that
might encourage that scenario.
Artist paints a precise portrait of Cuba in `Before Night Falls'
BY LYDIA MARTIN . lmartin@herald.com
When painter Julian Schnabel set out to make Before Night Falls, the
much-acclaimed film about the life of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, he wanted to
ensure he captured a Cubascape that felt authentic.
Difficult to do when you have to recreate the vibe of a place from a
distance. But Schnabel, better than most who have tried to capture Cuba from the
outside, delivers a Cuba where even the faded colors of Havana's buildings seem
exact.
He also delivers characters who sound like the real thing and look like the
real thing. A far cry from, say, the Ay-Caramba brand of Spanish spewed by Al
Pacino in Scarface.
``I didn't think anybody had gotten it right before. I didn't want my film
to be another bad caricature of Cuba,'' said Schnabel, who filmed Before Night
Falls, his second shot at directing, in Veracruz and Merida. The movie opens
Friday.
Schnabel, who spent the past few weeks in Miami to attend a special
screening of Before Night Falls to benefit the FIU-Miami Film Festival and to
visit with his parents, traveled to the island seven or eight times over the
past few years. He went to take in the visuals and to connect with the people
who surrounded Arenas, the persecuted author who spent time in Cuban jails for
his homosexuality and his insistence on writing his truths.
``I'm a painter, my job is to see things. I wanted to make a movie that was
believable, that really said something about a place. Nobody knows a damn thing
about Cuba in this country and to fuel more misinformation I thought would be a
travesty.
``I built 200 meters of the Malecón in Veracruz. And Merida, it turns
out, looks a lot like the Vedado section of Havana. There's a building in Merida
that looks very much like [the writer's union] building in Havana. There is a
white building across the street from it, just like the white building across
the street from the building in Havana. Anybody who knows the place, knows how
fastidious I was about the details.''
So fastidious, that at the end, he had Cuban actors dub over some of the
dialogue so that the accents are genuine.
``Reinaldo's grandmother in the beginning of the film is a Mexican actress
from Veracruz. But she sounded a little too Mexican so the voice you hear is
actually a Cuban actress,'' said Schnabel. ``We also did a totally Cuban-Spanish
version of the movie with all Cubans doing the voices. That's the first time
that has been done, usually when you are dubbing, you send a film to Madrid,
where you get a Madrileño Spanish that may have nothing to do with your
film.''
For the scene of a street bembé (a Santería drumming party),
where police descend to arrest worshipers, Schnabel only told a few participants
what would go down.
``Most of those people in the scene were Cubans and real worshipers who had
no idea the police was coming, so when you see them protecting the Santeria,
they are doing it genuinely.''
The film is generating plenty of applause. There's already Oscar talk, and
it shared the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival.
Spain's Javier Bardem, who plays Arenas, picked up Best Actor. He also was named
Best Actor from the National Board of Review.
Schnabel has been obsessed with Arenas' story since he saw Jana Bokova's
documentary Havana, an oral history of the island in which Arenas tells his
narrative.
``The enthusiasm and the disillusionment with the Cuban revolution -- this
guy's life was emblematic of the whole thing. You and I, as American citizens,
can go to the Hotel Nacional, or to a Cuban store, but a Cuban is not allowed.
There's something wrong with that. What separates Reinaldo from other people is
that what got him in trouble is also what saved him. He exchanged his body for
his body of work.''
Schnabel says he would love to show Before Night Falls in Havana, as he did
his first film, 1996's Basquiat, about his friend and art world counterpart
Jean-Michel Basquiat, the graffiti artist who became a star before dying of a
heroin overdose at age 27 -- but he fears repercussions from the government.
``I don't want to end up in a box,'' he says, referring to the
claustrophobic, pitch-black box where Arenas was enclosed for a week as
punishment for trying to smuggle his writings out of prison.
``I'm not a politician, but this is not a movie you can make in Cuba. I
believe that I have a privileged life. My father was also an exile. He left
Czechoslovakia when he was 15 and came here by himself. He taught me in a way
that you have to have some responsibility to keep your eyes open and to
approximate the truth.''
Let Americans travel freely to Cuba
By Philip Peters.
Allowing Americans to travel to Cuba would serve our national interest.
This New Year's Eve in Havana, 74-year-old Fidel Castro celebrated his 42nd
year in power. It wasn't supposed to be this way, especially after the Soviet
Union's demise put Cuba on the brink of economic collapse and Washington passed
tough laws in 1992 and 1996 to tighten the U.S. embargo.
One sponsor of those laws, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., predicted in 1996 that
Castro would not survive. "In a few short years, there will be freedom,
democracy, and human rights in Cuba, and we'll all go down there and have a good
time,'' he said.
Yet Castro remains in control, and U.S. policies remain unchanged. It is now
clear that if anything, the tough embargo policy strengthens Castro. It allows
him to portray Cuba as a victimized David to Washington's Goliath, and himself
as the defender of Cuban nationalism.
Usefully for Castro, the embargo also alienates the Cuban people. Cuba's
leading human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez calls it "an odd way
to demonstrate support for human rights.'' Cuba's Catholic bishops call it "cruel.''
And in the hundreds of interviews I have conducted across the island, I have
never met a Cuban citizen who supports it.
Faced with this failure, most pragmatic Americans would say that it's time
to try a new approach, even as we continue expressing stark disagreement with
Cuba's human rights practices. But as much as it would make sense to end the
embargo entirely, Congress seems inclined to take small steps, and the new Bush
Administration has not articulated a detailed Cuba policy.
So here's a start: Congress and the President should end the travel ban so
that all Americans may exercise their right to travel freely to Cuba, without
having to seek a special license from the federal government. This policy, which
aims to deny hard currency earnings to the Cuban government, may have made sense
when Cuba and the Soviet Union were threatening countries in this hemisphere.
It makes no sense today when, according to a 1998 Pentagon report, Cuba
poses no national security threat and its military capabilities are "residual''
and "defensive.'' The travel ban is unevenly applied. While all others are
barred from travel without a special license, Cuban Americans may travel once
annually in the case of a family "humanitarian emergency'' -- a restriction
that is not enforced in practice, and that leads to huge numbers of late
December and New Year's visits to supposedly sick relatives.
The travel ban is also arbitrary. It targets this source of hard currency
earnings when other flows remain open. Together, family remittances and revenues
from U.S. phone calls pump about $60 million each month into Cuba, much of which
reaches the government.
But one of the most important reasons to allow Americans to travel to Cuba
is that it would serve our national interest. In the past decade Cuba's economy
has made small turns toward free-market policies: allowing microenterprises to
open, allowing farmers to sell produce on the open market, opening over 300
freely priced farmers markets across the island, opening joint ventures with
foreign companies in tourism, mining, communications and other sectors.
Each of these reforms is limited by Cuba's still-prevailing socialist
ideology -- but each has allowed many thousands of workers to gain skills and
experience in market settings and to lift their families' earnings above the
Cuban average. As American travelers rent rooms in private homes, hire taxis,
dine in family restaurants and buy artists' works, they will boost these
entrepreneurs' earnings -- and they in turn will fuel demand for the produce
that private farmers bring to market. Cuba's emerging private sector will
expand.
Finally, an end to the travel ban would transmit American ideas and values
as students, churches, cultural and sports groups, and individual Americans meet
their Cuban counterparts.
Strong links between our societies may not topple Fidel Castro any sooner
than the trade embargo -- but as Cuba makes its way in a post-Soviet world, they
will encourage free-market development, help individual Cubans and their
communities and build links to the generation of Cubans that will succeed
Castro's generation. All of this serves our national interest. "There's
nothing positive in isolating a people,'' a Havana priest once told me. America
should heed his advice.
Philip Peters is vice president of the Lexington Institute in Arlington,
Va.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 