The
Washington Post Editorial. Thursday, January 18, 2001; Page A20
EVER SINCE their own improbable rise from persecuted dissidents to
presidents and ministers in democratic governments, Czech and Polish leaders
have made a special cause of those struggling against totalitarian rule
elsewhere in the world. More often than not, that has brought them to Cuba.
Fidel Castro's dictatorship reeks of the rot that they remember from the last
years of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe, and a handful of penniless intellectuals
there endure daily police harassment to publish underground newsletters or
report on human rights violations, much as Czech President Vaclav Havel or
Foreign Minister Jan Kavan once did. For the past two years, even as other
European governments have continued to cater to Mr. Castro, the Czech Republic
and Poland have successfully sponsored resolutions condemning Cuba before the
annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
Last week Mr. Castro's government responded in a way the Czechs must have
found bitterly familiar. Two prominent Czech politicians were arrested in the
town of Ciego de Avila after visiting a local dissident journalist and a member
of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights. Held incommunicado and without charge
since then, the two -- parliament member and former finance minister Ivan Pilip
and Jan Bubenik, a student leader in Prague's 1989 "Velvet Revolution"
-- were informed via the state-controlled media Tuesday that they are to be put
on trial for "counterrevolutionary" and "subversive"
activities. The Cuban propaganda apparatus is churning out the usual shrill
stuff: that the two Czechs are tools of anti-Castro groups in the United States,
that they were delivering money and resources and -- this part is no doubt
correct -- that they were sharing "experiences about anti-socialist
activities" with the Cuban dissenters.
Having themselves endured a particularly virulent strain of the Stalinist
police state, now almost extinct outside Cuba, the Czechs understand what this
is really all about: Another meeting of the U.N. rights commission is coming up
in March. Lacking an Elian Gonzalez to distract attention, Mr. Castro no doubt
hopes to drown out this year's East European-led review and sanction of his
record, at least inside Cuba, with a loud show trial of a couple of foreigners
from a country he figures cannot do much to fight back. If so, he is making a
large mistake. As Mikhail Gorbachev might attest, Communist rulers have
underestimated Mr. Havel and his countrymen at their cost.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
