By Laurie Goering. Tribune foreign correspondent. May 03,
2001. Chicago Tribune
HAVANA - Four years ago, Vladimiro Roca climbed aboard his bicycle and
peddled to Revolution Square. He had a document he wanted to deliver to the
island nation's Communist Central Committee, one he and friends had written.
Titled "The
Homeland Belongs to All," it called for multiparty elections in Cuba
and greater economic freedom.
Two weeks later, Roca and his friends were jailed. Roca's wife, Magaly de
Armas, remembers the nine hours that security police rifled their home, hauling
away books, papers, a typewriter and a file cabinet.
"It was terrible, chaotic," she says. "They were touching
everything ... taking things."
After 20 months in solitary confinement, Roca was tried and sentenced to 5
years in prison for sedition.
His friends--Martha Beatriz Roque, Rene Gomez and Felix Bonne--got 31/2
years each. They were freed a year ago on early conditional release, but Roca,
the renegade son of Communist Party hero Blas Roca, remains in prison in the
southern city of Cienfuegos, reading his Bible and waiting.
He is the best-known of about 350 political prisoners in Cuba's jails,
according to Elizardo Sanchez, the head of Cuba's Commission for Human Rights
and National Reconciliation. Visiting dignitaries from Pope John Paul II to Gov.
George Ryan have called for Roca's release for years, to no avail.
Cuban officials insist dissidents like Roca are merely common criminals,
representatives of "small splinter groups which have resulted solely from
U.S. financing" and are being paid to try to unseat Fidel Castro's
government.
"They have no authority. They are not legitimate," Cuban Foreign
Minister Felipe Perez Roque said in an interview recently.
Critics of Cuba's human-rights policy, however, point to the continued
imprisonment of dissidents such as Roca as one reason that Cuba last month was
condemned for human-rights violations at a UN human-rights commission meeting
held in Geneva, a bitter sore spot for the island.
Meanwhile, Roca, 52, waits in prison.
"Vladimiro's spirit is better than mine, more strong and positive,"
says de Armas, 50. "He's strong. He's the one cheering me up."
For her, life as a political dissident's wife has been exhausting.
"I worried but I never thought it would get to this extreme," she
said of her husband's political activities. "I never thought the
consequences would be so severe."
De Armas lives in the same house she once shared with Roca, in Havana's
Nuevo Vedado district. With its brown paint peeling and chain-link fence
rusting, it is the sorriest-looking house on an otherwise lovely block.
Trained as a nurse, she has not been able to hold a job in Cuba's state-run
economy since 1993, a common problem among dissidents and their families. De
Armas, her son and her married daughter's family, including her two young
granddaughters, share the house and try to live off the son-in-law's salary as a
recycling worker.
They have sold the car, the family silver, "our patrimony," de
Armas says. Under Cuba's socialist system, the house cannot be sold nor can the
family rent rooms without government permission.
Help comes in the form of food from the Cuban Catholic Church and cash sent
by family members in Miami and California. De Armas said a political supporter
in Italy also sends occasional funds.
"The pressures are really heavy on us," says de Armas. She is
thankful, though, for her neighbors.
While they don't knock on the door to offer support, she said, neither do
they scrawl slogans on her door or throw rocks.
Once a month she is allowed to travel to Cienfuegos for a three-hour visit.
The day before she stands in line for as long as five hours for a bus ticket and
then makes the three-hour journey.
The visit, from 9 a.m. to noon, takes place in the prison's noisy common
meeting area, set with cement tables and benches. She brings a meal of chicken,
powdered milk, cheese, peanuts, coffee, favorites to supplement her husband's
limited diet in prison, she says.
Sometimes her daughter and eldest granddaughter come along.
Every other month, the couple is allowed a conjugal visit, with time alone.
On leaving the prison, de Armas said she is sometimes strip-searched to make
sure she is not carrying out messages from her husband.
"It's very difficult," she says with a sigh.
She says Roca suffers from high blood pressure and occasional lung problems
but is in good spirits. Early during his solitary confinement he was given a
Bible to read and has since adopted a strong Catholic faith.
"It strengthens him," she says. "He asks the Savior for help."
Roca, a former fighter pilot in the Cuban military and a charismatic
economist, is housed with three other Cuban prisoners. De Armas says he has won
their respect, in part by working to ensure the rights of prisoners are upheld.
"Vladimiro is an educated person, a conversationalist. He can talk with
anyone," she said. "People ask his opinion, his help with family
problems."
Under Cuban law, prisoners who exhibit good behavior can have their
sentences cut and win early release. Roca, however, has served nearly four years
of his 5-year sentence, and there is little indication he might soon be
released.
That makes de Armas angry.
"They can't use his history to violate their own state laws," she
insists. Her husband "has had no indiscipline, no problems in prison,"
Her husband has not caused any disciplinary problems, she said, but "he
thinks he may have to serve the whole five years."
"He didn't commit any crime," she says. "He doesn't deserve
it."
Roca became an active dissident in 1991, four years after his father's
death, de Armas said. Roca and his father were close, though the son never
showed the same enthusiasm for Castro's 1959 socialist revolution.
In the treatise that landed him in prison, Roca and his co-authors: "There
is no doubt that the socioeconomic policies need to be reformed and redesigned
so as to achieve better results. The use of the society and the economy to exert
controls has to cease."
It was the document's last paragraph, however, that probably contributed to
their arrest:
"It is impossible to continue leading the nation to its ruin without
expecting an uncontrolled awakening of the populace in search of a rightful
space within a civil society with democratic institutions. That which no one
desires could well occur, and thus it is better to discuss solutions now than to
plunge our homeland into mourning tomorrow."
De Armas says her husband's views haven't changed much during his years in
prison and that if he gets out, he will continue with what he sees as his life's
work.
She, however, just wants her husband home. She does not have a dissident's
courage, she insists.
"I'm like a lot of people. I support the ideas but I'm afraid,"
she says. "I don't have enough valor to take that route." | 