This article's title copies the title of report issued last month which its authors (Human Rights Watch) describe as their “most comprehensive analysis of conditions for Cuba since Raúl Castro took power.”
The Cuban regime, though it sat for years on the U.N.'s “Human Rights Commission,” prohibits any human rights agency, including the International Red Cross, from visiting any of Cuba's 200 plus prisons (under Batista Cuba had 12 prisons.) So the HRW's Nik Steinberg visited Cuba and conducted his study secretly, interviewing Cubans in 7 of the island's 14 provinces. "We wanted to put on the table where Cuba stands on human rights," he said in a recent Miami Herald story.
“In July 2006, Fidel Castro handed control of the Cuban government over to his brother Raúl Castro” summarizes the HRW report. “As the new head of state, Raúl Castro inherited a system of abusive laws and institutions, as well as responsibility for hundreds of political prisoners arrested during his brother’s rule. Rather than dismantle this repressive machinery, Raúl Castro has kept it firmly in place and fully active. Scores of political prisoners arrested under Fidel Castro continue to languish in Cuba’s prisons. And Raúl Castro’s government has used draconian laws and sham trials to incarcerate scores more who have dared to exercise their fundamental freedoms.”
In this years' Index of Economic Freedom, The Heritage Foundation had already found Cuba as more economically repressive under Raul than under Fidel. Under Raul's, Cuba slipped down 1.1 notches to number 155 where it ranks almost neck to neck with North Korea. So for many Cuba watchers the HRW report was no surprise.
Particularly alarming to Human Rights Watch is the “judicial process” employed by Raul's regime for the continued repression. “Raúl Castro’s government has relied in particular on a provision of the Cuban Criminal Code that allows the state to imprison individuals before they have committed a crime. This “dangerousness” provision is overtly political, defining as “dangerous” any behavior that contradicts socialist norms."
Lest their “objectivity” be questioned, Human Rights Watch is not a Cuban-exile organization but rather an international human rights group that condemns the U.S. “embargo” of Cuba, Israeli policies in “occupied territories” and has condemned U.S. treatment of prisoners of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Stalinist legal provision HRW saw employed in today's Cuba in fact dates back almost half a century to Che Guevara's stint as the “brains of the Cuban Revolution” (as Time magazine crowned him in a 1960 cover story) "We send to Guanahacabibes people who have committed crimes against revolutionary norms,” explained Ernesto Guevara.
Guanahacabibes was a forced-labor camp in extreme western Cuba. “It is hard labor” said Guevara, “the working conditions are harsh." Even earlier, as Cuba's chief prosecutor/executioner, Guevara had instructed his judicial subalterns that: “judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute from revolutionary conviction.”
"Fear is a central part of the Cuban government's strategy” says the recent HRW report. Again this dates back, not just to recent pre-Raul rule, but to the initial days of Castroism, half a century ago. “Terror is an essential political instrument,” instructed Che Guevara to his “revolutionary tribunals.” “Only hypocrites refuse to acknowledge this. We must establish the pedagogy of the paredon (firing squad)”
Televised firing-squad executions were one element of this “pedagogy.”
Even earlier during the guerrilla skirmishing in Cuba's Sierra Maestra, Che had written in his diaries, "Now comes a period when terror will be exercised against the peasants.”
According to Reporters without borders, Castro's Cuba (pop. 11 million) imprisons the most journalists in the world, surpassed only slightly by China (pop. 1.3 billion.) and Iran (pop. 73 million.)
And completely forgotten to the worldwide MSM, the black Cuban Doctor,
Oscar Elias Biscet (an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience, which Nelson Mandela was not) presently suffers a sentence of 25 years in Castro’s dungeons essentially for quoting the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights along with the works of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi in a Cuban public square. Dr Biscet also denounced the Castro regime’s policy of virtual forced abortions. President Bush awarded Dr Biscet the Presidential Medal of Freedom two years ago.
The award was accepted at the White House by Dr Biscet's son and daughter in a ceremony virtually blacked out by the MSM.
Black Cuban dissident, Dr Darsi Ferrer was also arrested this July and languishes in a Castro prison. The regime of the so-called economic-reformer Raul Castro charged Dr Ferrer with the crime of “purchasing construction materials on the Black Market,” which is to say, the only place he could find them.
The Human Rights Watch Cuba report fully backs the findings of two polls conducted secretly in Cuba recently by dissident groups. One poll was by El Centro de Información sobre Democracia and the other by Alianza Nueva Nación. The groups interviewed 1000 Cubans in 9 of the nation's 14 provinces and found that 70 per cent, not only report that their (precious few) freedoms have diminished under Raul, but that life in general has become harsher, with less food available, more regime corruption, and more economic hardships in general. They also described Raul Castro as “intolerant, a liar, and a militarist.”
Regarding Raul as a liar, the respondents referred particularly to his blaming the “U.S. bloqueo” (so-called embargo) for their economic woes. In their scoffing at this time-worn adage the vast majority of Cubans part ways with Human Rights Watch, along with western “embargo” foes in general. This shows that most Cubans (unlike most scholarly “Cuba Experts”) know full well who runs Cuba, and how. And thus they plumb to the genuine reason for their persistent penury, regardless of which Castro holds top title. To wit:
Cuba is a military dictatorship in the most genuine sense of the term. Raul Castro and his military cronies have been running Cuba for over a decade and doing quite well in the process. Of the nineteen members of Cuba's politburo, nine are military men. This is more than the typical Soviet-bloc state had, or the Soviet Union itself.
One Raul Castro crony, General Julio Casas Regueiro, does much of this running, controlling 300 different "companies" (state agencies often in partnership with foreign investors) in Cuba under a holding company named GAESA. Among others is Corporacion Gaviota, headed by Raul Military crony General Luis Perez Rospide.
Gaviota started operating in 1990 and in a presentation on Nov. 18 at a hearing by the House Foreign Affairs Committee debating travel to Cuba by U.S. citizens, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Simmons, a recently retired Defense Intelligence Agency Cuba specialist, explained the issue in detail. He showed how Raul Castro's military owns virtually every corporation involved in Cuba's tourism industry, the regime's top money-maker.
The Cuban military's Gaviota tourism group, is a corporate umbrella encompassing, Aerogaviota SA, (airlines) Almest SA Hoteles Gaviota,(hotels) Gaviota Tour, (bus touring company), Marinas Gaviota, (marinas), Tiendas Gaviota, (tourist souvenir stores, restaurants) Parques Naturales Gaviota, (national parks, museums.)
The presentation also revealed something that goes a long way towards explaining the Raul Castro regime's confident entrenchment. Last year Cuba enjoyed record tourism revenues: 2.35 million tourists leaving $2.7 billion in military-regime coffers, and precious little else due to the regime's tourist apartheid, where Cubans (especially darker-skinned ones) are strictly segregated at billy-club and gun-point from tourist areas, except as waiters, maids, bellhops, shoe-shine boys, foot masseuses, etc.
In brief: from this tourist revenue windfall (ongoing for over a decade), Cuba's ruling military robber barons are making a killing. Why would they voluntarily upset their own apple carts, by democratizing the system and opening it to competitors? Given that they're the only ones in Cuba with guns, who's going to challenge them? None of those "Cuba Experts" (or HRW, which recommends an end to the U.S. travel ban) provide a clue.
“Lifting the U.S. travel ban to Cuba would be a great gift to the Castro's,” explained Cuban defector Alcibiades Hidalgo, who until 2002 served as Raul Castro's chief-of-staff, and would seem to know the insider details.
