Juan Carlos González Leyva IHT.
The International Herald Tribune. Thursday,
March 22, 2001.
CIEGO DE AVILA, Cuba Foreign radio informed us last month that after almost
four weeks in detention in Cuba, two Czech citizens had been freed and had
departed to Prague. Ivan Pilip, a former finance minister, and Jan Bubenik had
come to Cuba on Jan. 8 with the intention of assisting the civil society in my
country.
They brought equipment to help us work independently - the prosecution spoke
of a laptop, some diskettes and CDs - and experience to help us follow the
velvet model of transition, as applied in Prague, and not the bloody one, as in
Bucharest.
Would this be what Comandante Fidel Castro fears? Is it because of what they
intended to do for us that the two Czechs were arrested on Jan. 12?
Two weeks later, in a long television program called Round Table (I only
listened to it, because I am blind) the pair were accused of subversive actions.
The same program denigrated other such visitors from Latvia, Romania and Poland,
some of whom have also been detained by the Cuban authorities.
The program mentioned me as one of those whom the Czechs were planning to
visit. (We are called cabecillas de grupúsculos contrarevolucionarios,
that is, "ringleaders of tiny counterrevolutionary groups.") I
therefore feel it my duty to make a few remarks, so that public opinion abroad
does not think that we Cubans are all ungrateful, or that the official
propaganda reflects the people's feelings. As a lawyer, I am worried that there
may have been abuse of law by the Cuban authorities in the case of our two Czech
friends. As president of the Fraternity of Independent Blind of Cuba and of the
Cuban Foundation for Human Rights, I want to express profound gratitude toward
the two visitors and toward all those others who have come to visit us and
encourage us.
Here in Ciego de Avila, 425 kilometers east of Havana, such visits are like
serum that maintains us alive and gives us courage to continue our fight for
human rights and for an independent civil society. On several occasions in the
past the Czech Republic has helped us. Last year at the Human Rights Commission
of the United Nations it sponsored a resolution censuring the Cuban government
for its systematic violation of human rights. As a result, the Czech embassy in
Cuba was the object of an "act of repudiation" - an unspontaneous show
in which a mob demonstrates and screams hostile slogans in front of diplomatic
offices and dissidents' homes.
Paraphrasing President Vaclav Havel, author of the famous essay "The
Power of the Powerless," one could say Czech diplomacy gave a voice to the
voiceless by helping human rights activists in Cuba so that their cause was
heard. Our thanks for the courage to do it. We also ought to thank the German
foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, for lending support in defense of our Czech
visitors. I myself did not have the pleasure of meeting the two Czechs, but I
had an echo of sorts of their visit. I was detained in the city of Sancti
Spiritus on Jan. 16 and roughed up by state security agents who took away my
cane, my identification documents and my briefcase, threw me to the ground and
abandoned me in prickly bushes.
I suppose that the treatment I received was somehow connected with the
Czechs' plans to meet me, although it could also have been an independent
initiative, because it was not the first time I have suffered repression from
the hand of state security. On Feb. 8, state security agents attacked me again,
this time hurting me in my face. The wave of repression was directed against
more than two dozen persons from Ciego de Avila, including my wife, my brother
and my father, who have no dissident activities.
I hope that the incident with the two Czechs, now thankfully over, will not
discourage other friends of Cuban civil society to come and share with us their
experience. We await them eagerly.
Visits like that one help to break our isolation. They give us hope that our
transition, too, will be peaceful.
The writer is president of the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights. He
contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune
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