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Posted on Mon, Sep. 23, 2002 in
The Miami Herald.
Havel assures Cubans island will be free
Democratic values the key, he says
By Carol Rosenberg. Crosenberg@herald.com. Posted on Tue,
Sep. 24, 2002
Keep your eye on the prize -- a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba --
and don't focus on a timetable or specific event to trigger change, Czech
President Vaclav Havel advised Monday in a historic speech to anti-communist
Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits.
''Strive for the sake of the values themselves, without any calculations.
Sooner or later, this effort will bear fruit,'' said Havel, 65, architect of the
Velvet Revolution, which brought democracy to his homeland in 1989.
No single event ''sets the whole society in motion,'' he said.
"All of a sudden it starts crumbling, like a house of cards.''
In Miami on a first-ever visit to salute Cuban dissidents and former
political prisoners, Havel offered the advice during a morning lecture and round
table at Florida International University as part of his farewell solidarity
message.
Havel, who will step down as Czech president in February, plans to continue
his human rights activism. So his final event in Miami was a $1,000-a-plate
black-tie fundraiser Monday night that netted about $100,000 for the private
foundation that he plans to set up in Prague.
''It is not that I will give other people instructions on how to stage
revolutions,'' he elaborated to reporters. "But I will do what I have
always done: I will be promoting certain values associated with human dignity.''
SIGNIFICANCE
Havel's visit, coupled with his comments, was significant on several counts:
He may be the most prominent human rights activist ever to come here to
symbolically bridge the divide between island dissidents trying to topple Fidel
Castro and activists in exile.
Czech diplomats have been visiting Miami for months to choreograph the
event, complete with a live broadcast to Cuba via the U.S. government's Radio
Martí.
They also arranged for the reading of a special message from Oswaldo Payá
Sardiñas, an island dissident whom Havel is championing for the Nobel
Peace Prize. Havel and Payá spoke to each other for the first time
Monday, in a six-minute telephone chat.
Moreover, Havel is revered here as the ex-prisoner who led Prague's peaceful
change from communist to civilian rule -- a model eyed enviously by Cubans
casting about for a vision of how to proceed after Fidel Castro dies.
His visit also illustrated a bittersweet irony: Ailing after a bout of lung
cancer, Havel will step down at age 66 under Czech term limits more than a
decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while Castro, 76, remains solidly
in power.
Havel is also admired by members of South Florida's Jewish community for
making Prague a way station for Jews moving to Israel amid the collapse of the
Soviet Union a decade ago.
BLACK-TIE TURNOUT
Leaders and activists of both communities turned out for Monday night's
black-tie affair, rubbing elbows with about a dozen Czech leaders and diplomats
while Arturo Sandoval and other Cuban jazz musicians entertained.
Shunning his translator, Havel pledged in English that he and the Czech
Republic were committed to ''solidarity . . . for the people who fight for
freedom.'' Then he was expected to take a late-night flight back to Prague,
ending his 30-hour whirlwind visit.
The playwright-turned-politician set the tone at FIU with an almost
literary-style lecture that urged Cubans to cast off the mind-numbing yet
sometimes seductive vocabulary of communism.
"It is a language full of subterfuge, ideological jargon, meaningless
phrases and stereotypical figures of speech.''
Then he turned the event over to a round table of Cuban and Czech
intellectuals, as if to pass them the anti-communist baton.
Marifeli Pérez-Stable, an FIU sociologist who has studied Cuban and
Cuban American society for years, urged Cuban Miami to promote greater tolerance
as a model for a future island transition.
''Within our own rhetoric, our own ideas, our own history, there are
undemocratic seeds'' she said. "We are living a preview of Cuban democracy,
and thus we have a sacred responsibility to make it ever stronger, more
inclusive, more open. Let us continue to learn from the opposition in Cuba as we
draw even broader links of solidarity with them.''
University of Miami professor Jaime Suchlicki said only island Cubans can
bring meaningful change. He offered a rather pessimistic prediction that, after
Castro dies, his brother Raúl will pursue a nondemocratic Chinese model.
COLLEAGUE'S SALUTE
Payá, in his message, saluted Havel's human rights activism -- it
resulted in his plays being banned and landed him in jail for four years during
Czechoslovakia's communist era -- with a reference to the long-serving Cuban
political prisoners called plantados whose spirits did not break across decades
in Cuban jails.
"It is with the permission of these Cuban heroes, both those fallen and
living, that I venture to tell you, Mr. President, that you, too, are a
plantado.''
Payá is founder of the Varela Project, a petition campaign that used
the framework of the communist constitution to seek a national referendum on
democratic reforms on the island. He reported that government agents had
recently hurled insults and stones, and slathered mud on the home of a Varela
Project activist in a small town called Palmarito in Santiago de Cuba.
Havel has said that a key mission here in Miami is to ease the isolation and
loneliness of island dissidents. But Havel also used his time here pointedly to
pay homage to Cubans living in exile. On Monday afternoon he stopped by the
Freedom Tower -- once a processing center for island émigrés --
visiting the future headquarters of the Cuban American National Foundation.
''Every modern, freedom-loving person feels, or at least ought to feel, a
sense of solidarity both with those who are prevented from living in their home
country or from freely visiting it,'' he said, "and with those who are
forced to live in their country in a state of constant fear, and who cannot
leave it and return to it of their own free will.''
Sentencing of analyst who spied for Cuba postponed
By Tim Johnson. Tjohnson@krwashington.com.
WASHINGTON - The sentencing of a senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst
who spied for Cuba for more than a decade has been postponed for several weeks.
Federal prosecutors told U.S. Judge Ricardo Urbina in a recent court filing
that they need a little more time ''to permit additional debriefing'' of Ana
Belen Montes, the highest-level U.S. spy ever caught working for Cuba. Urbina
agreed to delay Tuesday's scheduled sentencing of Montes until Oct. 16.
Montes, who federal agents are debriefing in a secret location in the
Washington, D.C., area, was arrested a year ago at the Defense Intelligence
Agency's headquarters. In March, Montes confessed to a spying career that began
as early as 1985. | 
