Cubans turned over to police state
Posted on Sun, Mar. 03, 2002 in
The Miami Herald
For all the Mexican government's talk about human rights, it did little to
protect the rights of the 21 Cubans who sought refuge in its Havana embassy. For
all of Mexico's embrace of well-known Cuban dissidents, the Mexican government
handed the voiceless young men to a police state famous for beating and
torturing political prisoners.
Given Cuba's information monopoly, little can truly be known about who these
men are. They may be ordinary Cubans who, like most, can't see a future in a
corrupt, totalitarian system. Some may have ''criminal'' records, not unusual
where speaking your mind is a crime. Yes, some even may be Cuban intelligence
agents.
If these youths were nonpolitical, all that changed when they crashed a bus
into the Mexican embassy gate and began shouting ''Down with Fidel!'' The Cuban
regime quickly categorized them as ''anti-social'' pariahs -- jargon long used
to describe enemies of the Cuban regime and its political prisoners. If not
persecuted before, they certainly became prime targets then.
Meantime, the Cubans became an embarrassing problem for Mexican Foreign
Minister Jorge Castañeda, who early on denied that they were asylum
seekers. Did the Mexican authorities independently check the men's histories?
No, they relied on what the Cuban regime told them.
The Cubans' stay in the embassy lasted less than 30 hours. In a pre-dawn
raid, the Cuban equivalent of a SWAT team extracted the 21 men at the behest of
the Mexican government. The men were then carted off to parts unknown.
Mexican authorities said they asked the Cuban government to ''consider
humanitarian factors'' in these men's cases. But they should know better than to
expect humanity from a dictatorship. Mexicans had only to look outside their
embassy gate to see the regime's para-police and police forces beating and
arresting residents who have no human rights.
Perhaps Mexican President Vicente Fox and Mr. Castañeda have
forgotten what happened in 2000 when Mexico forcibly deported a high-ranking
Cuban intelligence officer when he sought asylum there. Pedro Riera Escalante
has since disappeared into Cuban jails. We haven't forgotten that Mr. Fox's man
in Havana, Mexican Ambassador Ricardo Pascoe, declared embassy doors closed to
dissidents only a year ago.
Is Mexico's human-rights rhetoric just that -- rhetoric? President Bush
should remind President Fox that promoting human rights requires more than talk.
''Inasmuch as they are universal values, human rights in any state are a
legitimate concern of the international community,'' Mr. Castañeda said
in a speech last March to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Promoting
human rights ''is a task common to all governments and all people.'' Mexico
should practice what it preaches. | 
