CUBAN CHANGES COMING? AND CASTRO’S DAUGHTER SPEAKS
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,707255,00.html
Cuban President Raul Castro has begun releasing 52 imprisoned dissidents. Is this the hoped-for signal of liberalization? Critics of the regime do not believe that a sea change is in the works. Instead, they fear it is just a tactical move designed to weaken the opposition.
The meeting point is in a rundown apartment building on an arterial road in southeast Havana, a place where tourists don’t go. The plaster is peeling from the walls, the windowpanes are cloudy and the wooden window frames are crumbling. There are no signs on the doors and no mailboxes. Even the rusty sign that reads “Ernesto Che Guevara” has seen better days and is missing a corner.
The door opens into the host’s “apartment,” a tiny, 80-square-foot room with a kitchenette, filled with two massive refrigerators from the 1950s, an old table, two chairs and a tattered armchair and couch.
The room next door is just as cramped. Juan Carlos Gonzalev Leiva, 45, sits on the bed to allow his visitor to sit on a chair in the room. Leiva is blind. An illness left him with impaired vision at birth, and he lost his sight completely in the early 1990s.
Leiva, a lawyer, is one of Cuba’s best-known dissidents. He is the general secretary of a human rights group, a sort of umbrella organization that represents about 70 opposition groups in the country, totaling more than 2,000 members, and about 50 political prisoners.
Leiva organized a nationwide meeting of dissidents. He criticized Fidel Castro publicly and in private letters. In one letter, he even described Castro as a “mass murderer.” In early 2002, the head of state and party leader had had enough and ordered Leiva locked up in a prison run by the secret police. He was sentenced to a four-year prison sentence, of which he served two-and-a-half years in prison and the rest under house arrest.
“They tortured me, beat me and humiliated me,” he says, “I didn’t think I was going to get out of there alive.” He still has the scars on his legs to prove it.
A laptop, fax machine and printer — not the most up-to-date models but better than nothing — are on a small table next to the visitor’s chair. Leiva still manages part of the Cuban opposition from this small room.
New Signals from Havana
The opposition made headlines earlier this month. In a surprising move, President Raul Castro yielded to pressure from the Catholic Church and the appeals of Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos and agreed to the release of 52 political prisoners, who will now be allowed to leave the country with their families. In fact, they probably have no choice but to leave Cuba. The first 11 arrived in Madrid last week, and the rest are expected to follow over the next few weeks.
At about the same time, Raul’s seriously ill brother Fidel made his first television appearance in four years. Fidel Castro is still officially the first secretary of the Cuban communist party, which makes him the party’s top leader. With a faltering voice, but otherwise in surprisingly good health, the Máximo LÃder, who is almost 84, discussed the “dangerous events in the Middle East” and the threat of a nuclear war against Iran.
Five days earlier, the Comandante en Jefe paid a surprise visit to the National Scientific Research Center in Havana, followed by appearances at the Center for Research on the World Economy, the national aquarium and the Foreign Ministry. Five appearances in about a week — an astounding feat for a man the world had all but written off. Since then, the opposition and observers are trying to make sense of all the new signals coming from Havana.
The 52 prisoners are the last of the so-called Group of 75, who Fidel Castro had imprisoned in the spring of 2003 for “counter-revolutionary activities.” In what would be his last spectacular blow against the opposition, the dissidents were given prison terms of up to 28 years.
Western diplomats believe that Raul’s decision to release the dissidents should be viewed as a signal. “He is showing Fidel that his time has finally run out,” says a European Union representative in Havana. Fidel’s demonstrative appearances last week, the EU official argues, are his response to this affront.
Forcing the Europeans’ Hand
But the release of the dissidents could also be a message to the Europeans, who have not been entirely sure what to make of the new president since he officially assumed office in February 2008. Raul is believed to be less of a fundamentalist and more of a pragmatist than his brother Fidel. “He is not someone who is out to change the system, but he does show an understanding for the problems,” says one of the Europeans in Havana.
At first, Raul Castro sparked hopes that reforms could be on the way. But so far his fellow Cubans have seen little change, except that they can now own mobile phones and computers with limited Internet access.
Europe, however, wants to see clear signs of liberalization, as a precondition of more intensive cooperation with Havana, especially “progress in the area of human rights and political freedom.” European governments reached this conclusion long ago, in December 1996, and the same conditions are still in place today. However, Castro has forced the Europeans’ hand by releasing the dissidents.
Faced with a catastrophic situation in Cuban agriculture, Raul Castro is urgently in need of aid from Europe. The sugarcane harvest this summer, once an important source of foreign currency, is the worst since 1905. It is even about half a million tons shy of the harvest in 2009, when hurricanes wreaked havoc on the country.
Cuba is now forced to import more than 80 percent of its food, while foreign investment and exports have declined dramatically. At the same time, the sugar island is practically bankrupt and has had to reduce imports of food products and spare parts by at least a third.
Tens of thousands of well-trained young Cubans are leave the country every year to earn money for their families elsewhere. The numbers would probably be even higher if the government let them go. For this reason, EU diplomats expect more signals from Raul on July 26, a Cuban national holiday: more privatization in agriculture, more freedom to buy homes and a relaxation of restrictions on travel abroad.
Dissident Leiva isn’t quite ready to believe that the country is opening up, even though he hopes that Raul is truly the pragmatist many take him for. He is pleased about the releases, because he knows what imprisonment means in Cuba. “I will not to go to prison again,” he says. “I would rather die.”
But Leiva sees the humanitarian gesture as primarily a tactical move. Once the 52 released prisoners have left the country, the opposition will have been all but silenced. The men will be accompanied by their families and wives, the “Damas de Blanco,” who have drawn the world’s attention to conditions in Cuba with their Sunday protest marches.
‘Change Will Be His Downfall’
A Western envoy in Havana also calls the prisoner release a “tactical stroke of genius that will eliminate 99 percent of critical voices in one fell swoop.”
The release has at least convinced Guillermo Fariñas, a prominent journalist and psychologist, to stop his hunger strike. His friends now hope that he will survive the consequences of his campaign. To protest the death of fellow dissident Orlando Zapata, who died in late February after an 85-day hunger strike, Fariñas stopped eating the next day.
Yoani Sanchez, 34, the world-famous blogger, and other members of the opposition convinced Fariñas, who was in a hospital in Santa Clara in central Cuba, to end his hunger strike. Now Fariñas plans to wait until November to see what Raul Castro’s next steps will be.
It is difficult to meet with Yoani Sanchez these days. Telephone calls are suddenly cut off the minute the caller introduces himself as a foreign journalist. In fact, her phone is usually not working at all. She is not permitted to have Internet access and she needs the help of foreign friends to publish her blogs. She is bugged, monitored and hampered in her professional life.
“Raul is playing for time,” says Sanchez. “For him, every new day is another day in power.” She has no faith in the government’s supposed easing of restrictions. “We’ve been hearing this for the last three years, on every national holiday,” she says. “Raul knows that Cuba needs change, but he also knows that change will be his downfall.”
Sanchez and her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, 63, a journalist and also a dissident, believe that the power struggle between brothers Raul and Fidel is far from decided. “The president has the spurs on his boots,” says Escobar, “but Fidel still holds the reins.”
Sanchez is a cheerful young woman, despite all the harassment by the secret police. She laughs a lot as she sits in a small bar in Havana, talking about her fight against the regime and how she gets around the Internet ban.
Her blog is now translated into 20 languages. “Of course I’m afraid,” she says, “but I have nothing to hide. I have no weapons. My weapon is my own free opinion.” She has faith in international public opinion, which, she says, is the only thing that helps in Cuba and against the regime.
Sanchez is convinced that Raul Castro’s concession only came as a result of pressure from the global public. The death of Zapata, Fariñas’s hunger strike, the “Damas de Blanco,” who she thinks should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the Internet activities of opposition members — Sanchez believes that all of these things have dealt a severe blow to the regime’s image.
“Raul was about to lose face,” says Sanchez, by which she means that he stood to lose face as a statesman. But then she corrects herself and says: “But that’s just a mask.”
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
Mariela Castro, daughter of the Cuban president, talks about economic reforms and human rights in her country, her relationship with her family and Cuba’s sexual revolution.
SPIEGEL: Ms. Castro, you are the proponent of a modern policy on AIDS and sexuality, the sort of policy one is more likely to see in the Western democracies. Is this a harbinger of reforms and overdue liberalization in Cuba?
Mariela Castro: That could possibly be the case.
SPIEGEL: Why is it taking such an endlessly long time? Even the president, your father, openly admits that the situation, in agriculture, for example, is worse than ever before. He has sharply criticized the inefficiency of government-owned operations. In other words, reforms are critical to Cuba’s survival.
Castro: Our people stand behind the Cuban form of socialism, but now it should be better than before. We are sufficiently self-critical to know this, and to know that our people want more flexibility and liberality. How this can happen is now the subject of discussion in many committees. It’s a slow process, but something is moving.
SPIEGEL: There isn’t much evidence of that.
Castro: And yet it moves, as Galileo once said. But we have to be careful. Cuba is a country that has always had enemies and is now under pressure from powerful groups in the United States seeking to dominate our country economically.
SPIEGEL: Many members of the opposition have lost patience. In February, imprisoned dissident Orlando Zapata died after an 85-day hunger strike, with which he sought to obtain the release of other political prisoners. The governments of the United States and the European Union have sharply criticized Havana’s behavior.
Castro: There was no political background to this strike. Zapata wanted to achieve personal privileges in prison: a telephone, a TV set and a kitchen. Of course, no one wanted him to die, but people abroad, in Miami, encouraged him to continue and to stick with his campaign until the end. He was used for a media campaign against Cuba.
SPIEGEL: You’re simplifying the issue. Even renowned Cuban artists often campaign against restrictions on free thought. The popular singer-songwriter Pablo Milanés, for example, recently made an appeal to the regime when he said: “You discuss and fight ideas, but you don’t lock them up.”
Castro: No one is punished for free speech in Cuba. If free and inconvenient thoughts were a crime in our country, I would have been a good candidate for prison, with my advocacy for sexual self-determination. Those people are in prison because they are mercenaries paid by Washington.
SPIEGEL: If they were all truly guilty of treason, you couldn’t simply release them this easily. The first of 52 political prisoners have just been released.
Castro: This isn’t the first time that mercenaries and terrorists have been allowed to emigrate after political talks. It shows that Cuba is always willing to engage in reasonable conversations. But we make our own decisions.
SPIEGEL: Cuba’s government is alone in the world with its view that these are mercenaries and terrorists. Without reforms, how do you intend to stop the exodus of young, well-educated Cubans?
Castro: Cuba is a poor country. Most of the Cubans who leave only do so if they can find better economic conditions elsewhere. That’s why we need changes. We have to offer incentives to keep people here. We have to create more attractive policies for young people, so that it also makes economic sense for them to stay. We need growth and a better quality of life for everyone.
SPIEGEL: Most of all, you need more freedom: more and better mobile phones, and unlimited and affordable use of the Internet and new media, for example.
Castro: Cubans are curious, no less than people elsewhere in the world. We want to try everything, but we also want to decide for ourselves on what is good for our country and what isn’t.
SPIEGEL: Why is Cuba so bold when it comes to the rights of homosexuals, of all people? After all, your uncle, the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, claimed that a homosexual lacked the “strength of character of a revolutionary.”
Castro: The successful fight for equal rights by the women’s movement has opened the door to fight offensively against other prejudices in our society. It’s like a new revolution, which Fidel also had to recognize.
SPIEGEL: Is there a personal reason why you campaign for the rights of gays and lesbians in particular?
Castro: For me, sexual identity and orientation is a human right, which should also be accepted by the United Nations. Of course, innovations in this area provoke contradictions, especially in a society like ours, which has so many revolutionary processes.
SPIEGEL: Cuba’s revolutionaries always liked seeing themselves in the role of lady-killers and truly macho men. Were they homophobic?
Castro: No more than others in other societies of the day in Europe and America. The ideals of our revolution were very progressive on some fronts but not on others.
SPIEGEL: For many decades, homosexuals in Cuba were sent to reeducation camps. Even today, the police still conduct raids at popular gay hangouts. Haven’t the reforms taken hold yet?
Castro: The police don’t always proceed with completely legal methods. That’s why we still have so much work ahead of us, which includes educating the police.
SPIEGEL: Do you owe the success of your work to your family name?
Castro: I don’t know. Of course, there has been and still is resistance in the party, as well as opposition within the population and on the part of some churches. And sometimes it’s the name Castro that provokes opposition.
SPIEGEL: Why did you withdraw a bill to legalize same-sex life partnerships for men and women? Did it go too far for your father?
Castro: No, he understood it and supported it. But there are people in his environment and in some governing bodies of the church who cannot understand it. We continue to fight. Where there are people there are sexual differences and homosexuality, even in the Communist Party. The opponents must recognize that our policy also benefits many party members by allowing them to have political careers.
SPIEGEL: Do you discuss politics with your father Raul?
Castro: We had more time to talk about politics before my father became president. He supported me in my work at the time, but now it’s become much more difficult. He was right to say: this is your fight, and you have to win it on your own.
SPIEGEL: How is your uncle? Is he still involved in politics?
Castro: I haven’t seen Fidel since he fell ill. But my father tells me that he is now much better. There have also been foreign visitors who have met with him since then.
SPIEGEL: The party newspaper, Granma, regularly publishes his controversial “reflections.” He recently predicted the premature end of the football World Cup, because he expected a war to break out against Iran.
Castro: He still has a lot of energy. He writes a lot and, if he had his way, would still be changing the world. But he is less and less involved in everyday politics. There are others who do that now.
SPIEGEL: At 79, your father Raul isn’t exactly the youngest, either. Could you imagine being his political successor one day?
Castro: No, I have played my role in politics, both professionally and as a citizen. My parents even prevented me from being nominated for other political tasks, because politics is also emotionally stressful. I suppose they wanted to protect me.
SPIEGEL: What will Cuba look like after the Castro era?
Castro: I hope that the economic, financial and trade blockade against Cuba will be lifted, so that the economy can grow and wages can rise. But I also hope that we will not compromise our independence and become weak, and that we will never betray our ideals of equality and social justice. This is what our parents fought for, and we owe it to them.
Interview conducted by Manfred Ertel. Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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