Cuba's biggest threat: New ideas and information.
Editorial. Published Wednesday, January 17, 2001, in the
Miami Herald
A government threatened by outside views needs to repress free expression in
order to sustain itself. As so it has come to pass that mere conversation has
landed two Czech citizens in jail in Cuba.
Ivan Pilip, a member of the Czech Republic Parliament and former finance
minister, and Jan Bubenik, a student leader of the 1989 Velvet Revolution and
president of the Czech Pro-Democracy Foundation, were detained by Cuban
authorities after the two met with two local dissidents in central Cuba on
Friday.
In similar cases, such pesky foreigners routinely have been expelled. But
yesterday the Cuban regime announced that Messrs. Pilip and Bubenik would be
sent to trial. A diatribe in the state-owned newspaper said that the men
violated their tourist status by making "subversive contacts'' with "counterrevolutionaries.''
The truth is that Cuba's bankrupt regime cannot survive any close
examination. The free flow of information and ideas, however modest, is its
biggest threat. So while the world has opened to Cuba, as exhorted to by Pope
John Paul II in 1998, Cuba's regime hasn't opened to the world.
Instead it has clamped down, harassing and detaining struggling dissidents
regularly. Such repression has well led to increasing international condemnation
of Cuba's human-rights abuses.
The regime wasn't happy last April when the Czech Republic, along with
Poland, presented a resolution before the United Nations Human Rights Commission
condemning Cuba's practices. Relations with the Czech Republic have been
strained since.
Too bad for Messrs. Pilip and Bubenik, protagonists of their country's
peaceful transition to democracy from Soviet-style communism -- dangerous role
models for a totalitarian state.
If the regime is determined to make an example of the Czechs, it will do so.
The example that they'll really represent, however, is that of the continuing
abuse of Cuban citizens and of foreigners who have "politically incorrect''
ideas.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 