Published Thursday, February 17, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Castro's crackdown worsens, critics say
By Juan O. Tamayo. [email protected].
A Cuban government crackdown on dissent has grown so harsh -- including brief kidnappings, secret jails and a threatened clandestine execution -- that human rights activists are calling it the worst in a decade.
Police briefly detained 304 dissidents, restricted the movements of another 201 and have been holding 22 more for possible trials since early November, Cuba's foremost human rights monitor, Elizardo Sanchez, said Wednesday.
Prosecutors are seeking a 10-year prison term for the government's most prominent critic, Oscar Elias Biscet, and recently won a six-month term for Victor Arroyo, a dissident accused of giving children toys sent by exiles.
The crackdown comes at a time when President Fidel Castro appears increasingly worried about the level of discontent on the island and the recognition that dissidents have been winning in Cuba and abroad.
Police patrols in Havana, which rose dramatically in January 1999 amid government complaints of a growing crime wave, have intensified further since late November, said several residents of the Cuban capital.
``Where two policemen used to stand in a corner, you now have four,'' Sanchez said.
Eight foreign heads of government and foreign ministers made a point of meeting with Sanchez and other dissidents during a summit meeting Nov. 15-16 of Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese leaders in Havana.
Cuban officials deny any crackdown.
``This is an invention, said Luis Fernandez, spokesman for the Cuban diplomatic mission in Washington. ``I know nothing about any such numbers, but my country would never permit the existence of any counterrevolutionary group that could threaten our national security.
Sanchez, a former professor of Marxism considered the most moderate and accurate of Cuba's human rights activists, said his numbers are clear -- 121 brief detentions in November, 141 in December and 42 in January. The numbers for February are running about the same as January, he said.
'WORST IN 10 YEARS'
"Our data makes this the worst wave of repression in 10 years, he told The Herald in a telephone interview from Havana. Sanchez's report is expected to bolster an attempt to condemn Cuba at the annual U.N. Human Rights Commission meeting next month in Geneva.
Sanchez said he was particularly concerned by some of the new and allegedly unlawful methods that Cuba's secret state security police have been using to harass and intimidate dissidents.
Many of those detained for brief periods were not taken to official police stations or jails but to secret ``security houses around Havana in what Sanchez called ``caricatures of kidnappings.'
Police who ordered the 201 dissidents to stay at home or away from Havana during some scheduled meetings of dissidents showed no orders from any judges or prosecutors, he added.
PERMISSION TO LEAVE
In another effort to silence critics on the island, an unusually large number of dissidents have been receiving long-denied government permission to leave Cuba, said Ruth Montaner, a Miami exile active in ing dissident groups in Cuba.
Cuba -- which has long boasted that dissidents are never tortured, disappeared or murdered, unlike practices in other parts of Latin America -- has also seen a small number of incidents involving violence or death threats.
Brothers Guido and Ariel Sigler suffered broken ribs after a pro-government mob attacked them after a December meeting of their Alternative Option Movement in the north-central town of Pedro Betancourt, Montaner said.
Sanchez said he received a signed complaint from Nestor Rodriguez, head of Youths for Democracy, accusing police of a threatened execution.
THREATENED MURDER
After detaining Rodriguez on Dec. 27 in the eastern city of Santiago, police drove him in the dead of night to an isolated field about 15 miles outside the city while showing him their pistols and saying they were going to kill him, Rodriguez charged. They abandoned him in the field.
Sanchez and several other leading dissidents signed a letter to the government last week demanding proper medical treatment for Marta Beatriz Roque, a jailed opposition leader suffering from a serious ailment.
Roque, Vladimiro Roca, Felix Bonne and Rene Gomez Manzano are serving jail ranging from 3 1/2 to 5 years on charges of sedition -- issuing a declaration attacking the Cuban Communist Party's monopoly on power.
``It is a return to the bad old days, where even medical treatment is used as part of the government's psychological war against dissidents, said Montaner, who has kept close tabs on Roque's health problems.
IN ELIAN'S SHADOW
Many of the dissidents complain that the crackdown has been overshadowed by the media coverage of Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old shipwreck survivor at the heart of a custody battle between his father in Cuba and relatives in Miami.
``I have never seen a wave of repression so long and harsh that has drawn so little attention from the international media, said Hector Palacios of the Democratic Solidarity Party in Havana. ``We have been forsaken.
But just why the Cuban government launched the crackdown on dissent remains unclear.
Palacios said it may have been triggered by all of the attention the foreign leaders and journalists gave to government critics during the IberoAmerican summit, sometimes jokingly called ``the dissidents' summit.
Others speculate that the trigger was the recent growth in the number and organization of dissidents -- from about 10 dissidents in 1987 to about 1,000 today, aligned with 60 to 80 groups.
Cuba now has groupings of dissident teachers, physicians, journalists, farmers, lawyers, Christians, economists and librarians.
Third Cuban doctor in brigade seeks asylum in Venezuela
By Tim Johnson. [email protected].
CARACAS -- The third Cuban doctor to seek asylum in Venezuela this month came forward Wednesday and said she was emboldened when two of her colleagues were granted residence visas last week.
The doctor, Gliselia Alonso Palmero, came to Venezuela as part of a Cuban medical brigade after disastrous flooding and rock slides Dec. 15-17 that left more than 6,000 people dead.
As relief work has diminished -- and amid reports that new defections may be in the offing -- Cuba has reduced its brigade of 454 physicians. Sixty-three doctors left for Cuba on Tuesday.
Alonso Palmero, an internist, said she faced discrimination in Cuba for not ing the Communist Party and would seek asylum in Venezuela, like two fellow Cuban doctors last week.
``I made the decision when I saw what happened to them,'' she told a reporter for the Globovision TV network.
The Foreign Ministry denied asylum petitions by the two doctors, Reynaldo Colebrook and Heberto Navarro, but granted them one-year residence visas in what appeared to be a delicate compromise to avoid straining the friendship between President Hugo Chavez and Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Most of the Cuban medical brigade arrived in mid-December and spread across the devastated northern coast, staffing 47 hospitals and makeshift clinics.
Alonso Palmero, a divorced Havana resident, said she was one of 86 doctors dispatched to Santa Barbara in western Zulia state.
``I don't think they can send me back to Cuba. That would be bad. I've risked my life and my future with this decision [to seek asylum],'' she said.
An exile spokesman in Venezuela, Hector Carbonell, said other Cuban doctors were debating asylum requests -- generating concern among Cuban authorities.
``They know that once the doctors have with Venezuelan society, they will see the contrast with the way they live in Cuba,'' he said.
The December floods underscored the Chavez government's shifting foreign policy. Caracas accepted the large Cuban medical brigade, but turned back two U.S. naval vessels bringing a road-building crew. One of the ships was already on the high seas.
Many in Washington saw the decision as a slap in the face.
Elian's dad wants Cuban envoys to visit the boy
By Elaine De Valle And Jay Weaver . [email protected]
In his third letter in 12 days, the father of Elian Gonzalez said Wednesday that he wants Cuban diplomats in the United States to visit with the 6-year-old boy in his Miami home.
The letters, signed by Juan Miguel Gonzalez and published in the Cuban Communist Party daily Granma, have provoked skeptical comments from Miami relatives who say the Cuban government is the author of these missives. Still, they have been read by people in high places, stimulating serious
communications between Cuban and U.S. officials.
The latest letter, to Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, said, ``You will recall that early this year I requested the MINREX [Foreign Ministry] to use diplomatic channels to arrange for our representatives in Washington to visit Elian and meet with him.
``I understand that the MINREX made the approach, but until now that visit has not taken place. In view of the time elapsed and my and my family's growing concern, I beg you to insist that the United States authorities agree to that visit.''
Gonzalez has expressed increasing frustration with the U.S. government's failure to follow through on its Jan. 5 promise to return the boy.
Luis Fernandez, spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., said that consular officials there have made several requests to meet with the boy and see his living environment firsthand.
``The INS has said they are considering, but there has been no response,'' Fernandez said.
Said INS Spokeswoman Maria Cardona: ``The Justice Department is consulting with the State Department about the request. That's something we've been looking at for a while.''
OFFICIAL RESPONSE
She also said that the agency would by today have an official response to the father's two previous letters written this month. The latest demanded the boy's immediate return and rejected the Miami relatives' petition for an ``independent guardian'' to represent his interests in the federal
court dispute. An earlier one requested the boy be placed with another uncle in Miami who agrees that Elian should go back to his home in Cuba.
Previously, a Justice Department source has said it was ``unlikely'' Elian would be moved from the Little Havana home of paternal great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez, where he has lived since he was found clinging to an inner tube off the coast of Fort Lauderdale on Thanksgiving Day. His mother, her
boyfriend and nine others died in the trip that brought the boy to South Florida.
Lazaro Gonzalez and other Miami relatives -- with widespread in the Cuban exile community -- are fighting to keep Elian in the United States.
But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, speaking at a press conference at the nation's capital Wednesday, said such a decision could cause ``international repercussions'' and hamper U.S. efforts to return U.S.-born children who have been kidnapped or taken to third countries by one parent
over the objections of another.
In January, INS ruled that only Elian's father could make parental decisions on behalf of the boy and that the two should be reunited. But the child's Miami relatives have challenged that ruling in a Florida federal court, claiming he has a constitutional right to an asylum hearing here. U.S.
District Judge William Hoeveler will hear arguments Tuesday on whether he has jurisdiction to consider the Miami relatives' challenge of the INS ruling. If the judge decides he does have jurisdiction, the case could be heard as early as the week of March 6.
LETTER-WRITING
In the meantime, the boy's father -- in tandem with the Cuban government -- has launched a letter-writing campaign to focus attention on his custody rights and the boy's welfare.
``We are worried not only because of his prolonged kidnapping but also because we lack direct information about the actual conditions in which his daily life is led,'' said the latest letter.
Said Fernandez, the Cuban diplomat in D.C.: ``The father himself, of course, wants to have some kind of supervision over the boy. He wants to know, as he has written before, who the family is, who has visited there. . . . Who is the psychologist seeing the boy? What kind of medicines is he
taking? What exactly are the criminal records of everybody involved?''
Even though the past DUI convictions of Lazaro Gonzalez and his brother Delfin -- as well as crimes committed by two of the boy's cousins -- have been written about in U.S. and foreign media, Fernandez said Cuban officials want to investigate on their own.
``We don't know if there are more there,'' Fernandez said. ``There are always new things coming out.''
MIAMI FAMILY: NO WAY
Armando Gutierrez, a spokesman for the family, said such a visit would never happen.
``Fidel is dreaming. Because he is the one who wrote the letter. Imagine after what happened with the grandmothers, how is that family going to let Cuban spies into their home? It is putting that child in a cage with a lion.''
He also believes Wednesday's letter, like the others, was not written by Elian's father.
Roger Bernstein, one of the attorneys representing Elian's Miami relatives, said he did not know if they would attempt to block such a meeting.
``But I'm disappointed that Juan Miguel doesn't come here himself to find out the condition of the home.''
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin returned to lobby of Congress on the Elian Gonzalez case, urging them to legislation designed to put the dispute in family court.
O'Laughlin, president of Barry University, supervised a meeting between Elian and his grandmothers, then changed her mind about the boy's fate.
Herald staff writer Frank Davies and Herald translator Renato Perez contributed to this report.
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