Posted on 04/25/2003 11:55:54 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Cuban President Fidel Castro on April 25, 2003, defended the firing squad executions of three ferry hijackers as a deterrent to a mass exodus that he said the United States was seeking to provoke in communist-run Cuba. The April 11 execution of three men who commandeered a Havana commuter ferry in a bid to reach U.S. soil followed two successful hijackings of passenger planes to Florida within two weeks. (TV Cubana via Reuters)
HAVANA (Reuters) - President Fidel Castro defended on Friday the firing squad executions of three ferry hijackers as a deterrent to a mass exodus that he said the United States was seeking to provoke in communist-run Cuba.
The April 11 execution of three men who commandeered a Havana commuter ferry in a bid to reach U.S. soil followed two successful hijackings of passenger planes to Florida within two weeks.
"The wave of hijackings had to be stopped radically," Castro said on Cuban television. The executions ended a three-year moratorium on capital punishment in Cuba and shocked human rights organizations.
The 76-year-old leader said Cuba had to apply the death sentence without hesitation to avoid further armed attempts to leave the island by Cubans expecting to be received as heroes in the United States.
Castro, in power since a 1959 guerrilla revolution, warned that future hijackers should not expect clemency from his government and would be given summary trials.
The executions, which followed the arrests of 75 dissidents in the worst political repression in Cuba in decades, prompted an outpouring of criticism worldwide and lost Castro some close friends among left-wing intellectuals, such as Portuguese Nobel prize winning writer Jose Saramago and Uruguayan journalist and author Eduardo Galeano.
But Castro blamed his longtime ideological enemy the United States for the hijackings, saying U.S authorities were tolerant of Cuban hijackers, granting bail to the six who forced a DC-3 airliner to fly 90 miles to Florida at knife-point.
TO SEA IN SMALL BOATS
While hundreds of its citizens try to leave economically battered Cuba each year, often by taking to the sea in small boats, Havana says the United States encourages the illegal migration by granting automatic residence to Cubans who make it to U.S. soil, the only nationality to enjoy such treatment.
Castro, smarting at the George W. Bush administration's stepped up efforts to undermine his rule by pushing for democratic changes within his one-party state, charged that Washington, backed by Cuban exiles in Miami, was seeking to disown migration accords and provoke another mass exodus that would serve as a pretext for military intervention in the island.
"The sinister idea is to provoke an armed conflict between Cuba and the United States in the hope of ending the revolution," he said on a television program where he spoke for almost four hours.
Cuba has allowed mass departures in 1980, when 125,000 people left from the port of Mariel, and in 1994, when 35,000 Cubans were picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard, many taken to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Most ended up in the United States.
Castro said the top U.S. diplomat in Havana, James Cason, was sent to Cuba last year with instructions to stir up opposition to his government and had overstepped the boundaries of diplomatic conduct.
The Cuban leader repeated his accusations that Cason was "a bully with diplomatic immunity" who had turned the U.S. mission into "an incubator of counterrevolutionaries" by allowing dissidents to openly hold meetings in his residence.
Most of the 75 dissidents and independent journalists arrested and given stiff prison terms on charges of being on the payroll of the United States and conspiring to subvert the government were activists seeking peaceful reforms.
Fidel Castro's friends in Ottawa***Engagement with Cuba has been the official line in Ottawa for decades. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was famously chummy with the Cuban dictator, and left-wing Canadian politicos have been sucking up to Havana ever since -- mostly as a means to demonstrate Canada's moral superiority to the United States. Indeed, Canada indirectly helps prop up Cuba's government in a number of ways. From 1994 to 1999, the federal Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) provided $34-million in development assistance to Cuba. Last November, CIDA pledged $750,000 over six years toward a University of New Brunswick project to help Cuba create a biomedical engineering education program. Last October, CIDA made a three-year, $2.9-million commitment to a training program for Cuban workers run by the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. Moreover, in the 2000-2001 fiscal year, Canadian taxpayers paid about $30-million to cover Canadian exports to Cuba that el jefe máximo could not or would not pay for. Canada has also granted Cuba what amounts to a $14-million line of credit to help pay for Canadian agricultural imports.
As noted above, Mr. Chrétien justifies propping up Mr. Castro's dictatorship under the theory that "it's better to be engaged because that's putting pressure." But in this regard, we'd like to direct the Prime Minister's attention to a brilliant piece of historical analysis published by Cuba expert Ann Louise Bardach in last Sunday's New York Times. As Ms. Bardach shows, it is exactly at those junctures when Cuba was most "engaged" with the West that Mr. Castro -- fearing glasnost might undermine his authoritarian rule -- took deliberate steps to cement his rogue status.***
They were all sentenced to more than 15 years for not agreeing with the official or party line.
The blow that the government has struck against the peaceful opposition within the island (no home search turned up bombs or guns) shows that the dissidents were doing a good job.
To accuse them of ''subverting the established order'' demonstrates how feeble the administration's hold on power really is. Ideas cannot be smothered, even if those at the top think that they have eliminated all opposition.
………………….To complain in a soft voice on the bus, in the bread queue and at the grocery store are the are the only escape mechanisms for the bitterness of not being able to say what we are thinking.
My husband told me during the last visit that State Security agents tell him about me every day, with whom I meet and what I say. This is their way of putting the fear in him and make him understand that I, too, could go to prison.
That's the daily blackmail at State Security headquarters. It's the blackmail of those who fear the power of humble but firm words with which some of us dare call a spade a spade.
Maybe some more of us will still be stuffed into a cell in a Cuban prison, but I'm positive that they won't be able to smother ideas.
In the world beyond, Castro does not have absolute power.
Claudia Márquez Linares is an independent journalist in Cuba. Her husband is among a group of peaceful dissidents recently rounded up and sentenced to prison terms in Cuba.
April 24, 2000 - Useful Idiots Hard at Work*** On April 15, at the Cuban Diplomatic Mission in Washington, DC, America got a glimpse at how Juan Miguel's hosts deal with dissent. Annoyed by a crowd of Cuban-American protestors, a group of fifteen men inside the mission ran outside and pummeled the demonstrators so severely that several required treatment at a local hospital. According to the Associated Press, US Secret Service agents, who are charged with guarding the mission, had to strike the attackers with batons to subdue them.
Now that's a "state of imminent danger" to one's "physical and mental well-being." Not that Dr. Redlener will take note. Like Janet Reno and Greg Craig, he is a diligent minion of Castro's totalitarianism-a useful idiot, as Lenin once called his Western accomplices. For Elian Gonzalez to stay in the US, he will have to overcome a vast force of useful idiots-starting with the contingent that occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.***
Cuban Embassy in Canada *** To access the web page of the Embassy of Cuba in Canada, just make a clic on this master piece of one of the most famous Cuban painters, Carlos Enríquez, "El rapto de las mulatas"***
"As a Mexican, I wish for my country neither the dictates of Washington on foreign policy, nor the Cuban example of a suffocating dictatorship," he wrote in a letter published in Mexico City's Reforma newspaper. He wasn't alone. Saramago, a Portuguese writer who won the 1998 Nobel Prize for literature and considered himself a close friend of Castro, said Cuba "has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams."
Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who lives part-time in Cuba, has been silent on the issue. But his magazine, Cambio, published an article saying "few other repressive waves have left a government so isolated and rejected." The government responded by publishing rebukes in the Communist Party daily Granma. In one letter published Saturday, a group of well-known Cuban intellectuals urged their colleagues to stop criticizing the island. ***
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