VOCAL: Gisela Delgado, wife of jailed dissident Hector Palacios, talks to the media outside Santa Rita Church in Mirimar.
She has been pressured by the Cuban government to stop speaking to foreigners. JOSE GOITIA/AP
Posted on 05/22/2003 12:24:57 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
HAVANA - In the airy vestibule of Santa Rita Church in the seaside suburb of Mirimar last Sunday, among the pews full of couples and families young and old, a group of 20 unaccompanied women in white blouses and black scarves stood out.
They are the "widows" of Cuba's recent political crackdown - the wives of the human rights activists, political-reform campaigners, and independent journalists sentenced to prison terms of up to 28 years. Of the 75 dissidents convicted in hasty trials in April, only independent economist Marta Beatriz Roque is a woman.
Every week the wives gather at the church of the patron saint of desperate causes.
"We have come to remember our husbands," said Miriam Leiva, wearing a T-shirt imprinted with a photo of her jailed spouse, independent economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe. "This is an act of solidarity and support for their cause."
VOCAL: Gisela Delgado, wife of jailed dissident Hector Palacios, talks to the media outside Santa Rita Church in Mirimar.
She has been pressured by the Cuban government to stop speaking to foreigners. JOSE GOITIA/AP
Cuban officials insist that the sweep was necessary to thwart a US-hatched plot to foment a fifth column to topple President Fidel Castro. The jailed dissidents and their supporters insist that their only crime was to dare to challenge the authority of Mr. Castro's one-party state.
While the convictions have shattered Cuba's budding dissident movement, it has also created a new union among the men's wives. They are not a movement, the women insist, but a circle of friendship and support in a time of shared hardship.
For some, this challenge is just a further step in the work they shared with their husbands. For others, who took little interest in the dissident movement, circumstances have compelled them to become more active. For all the women, life with their men behind bars is a struggle to hold the family together while doing what they can to win their husbands' release.
Strangers before arrests
Many of the wives, now friends, were strangers before their husbands' convictions. Many met for the first time in the weeks between trials when many Havana dissidents were held at the Cuban state security headquarters of Villa Marista.
"We would see each other bringing clothes and food to our husbands," says Blanca Reyes, wife of independent journalist and poet Raúl Reyes, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison. "We would talk about our families and how we were doing. I did not know all the names of the other wives, but we knew what we were doing there. We stay in contact and now we have this union together. We support each other; it reminds us that we are not isolated."
Ms. Reyes jokes at the irony that some now call her a cabezita, or little head among the women, when she took almost no interest in her husband's work before his arrest.
"I knew about his work, and I supported it, but I never participated in any activities," she says. "I never went with him to the embassies or his meetings."
Within weeks of her husband's arrest, Reyes had circulated a letter among the other wives appealing for support from the pope, the Spanish royal family, and the first ladies of European Union presidents.
"[Our husbands] are in prison and we are free. What else can we do?" she asks. "I'm not asking that they reduce the sentences. We want them to eliminate the sentences. In my husband's case, all he did was write. The only things that they confiscated from our house as evidence were press articles. I won't stop speaking until they let him free, or they put me in prison."
But her defiance is cut by realism. In the first few weeks that they worshiped together, the women held a silent march along the shady lanes by the church. Recently, Cuban security officers have visited several of the most visible and active wives, such as Ms. Leiva, to warn them that there would be consequences if they continued to march and to discourage them from even attending the church service.
Concerned that they might be arrested and thus unavailable to their husbands, the women have ceased their protest marches, though many continue to attend worship.
Speaking in her central Havana apartment, Reyes says she feels bound to do what she can to stay out of prison. As she spoke, she prepared for her next prison visit, packing a parcel of necessities: magazines, a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses, papers, pens, roach spray, mosquito spray, toothpaste, shaving cream, and dried food.
"I am the only one fit to look after Raúl," she says. "I have a responsibility to him to stay alive and free."
Helping each other financially
After their convictions, the men were transferred by Cuban authorities to distant provinces. Mr. Rivero is serving his sentence nearly 300 miles from Havana in the province of Holguin. Mr. Chepe is being held in easternmost province of Guantanamo, more than 550 miles from Havana.
Organizing transport to visit their husbands is just one burden the women share. Not all have the same resources to pay for such travel, Reyes says, noting that the wives have been known to lend each other money.
Last week, many of the prominent wives like Leiva and Reyes were told that the visiting schedule was being changed. The once-weekly visits have now been reduced to every three months. After this week's visit, Reyes says, the next time she expects to see her husband is at the end of August. That is punishment, the women speculate, for refusing simply to accept their husbands' fate.
Gisela Delgado sits in a small room in her Havana home, the walls crowded with shelves of new volumes on art, architecture, literature, and other subjects. The collection once served as one of Cuba's independent libraries. Now there are gaps under headings like "journalism" and "human rights." Cuban state security officials confiscated those books.
Ms. Delgado heads Cuba's association of independent libraries. Her husband, Hector Palacios, was a leading dissident figure in the movement Todos Unidos - All Together - before he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
'We feel great pressure'
In the past few weeks, Delgado has been one of the most outspoken dissident wives, giving frequent interviews to Miami-based Radio Marti, other foreign news services, and journalists based in Havana. Many wives are too intimidated to speak out as she does, Delgado says, and for her activism she has been refused visits to her husband and otherwise targeted for abuse.
"One of the teachers at my daughter's school told her that I had better stop talking to foreigners if she wanted to go to university, because they did not accept children of counterrevolutionaries," she says. "Someone else went to my mother-in-law's house telling her that because of my work, her son would not get his prison visit this week."
"We feel great pressure. I think that I feel like I can be arrested at any moment," she says. "Still, the government wants to squash the voices of freedom. That is why they arrested our husbands. We have to continue their work."
……………..The United States, Canada and the European Union are those threatening to take unspecific action against Havana if the dissidents are not released. Their sentences are under appeal. Sanchez said the dissidents were being held in "inhuman conditions" in small cells where they received water and food "that does not meet minimum sanitary requirements." Sanchez, whose group has monitored Cuban prison conditions for years, said writer and poet Raul Rivero and leading dissidents Hector Palacios and Oscar Elias Biscet were among those in solitary confinement.
The wives of some of the dissidents confirmed Sanchez's statement, a few saying their husbands were being punished for not cooperating with prison authorities. "He told me it was a very narrow cell. He has lost 30 pounds," Raul Rivero's wife, Blanca Reyes, said, after visiting her husband in central Ciego de Avila province. Sanchez said many of the dissidents were sent to prisons far from their homes, making family visits difficult. ***
Castro cannot quash all dissent - books not bombs put them in prison *** Owning ''books contrary to the socioeconomic process,'' an old computer and a video camera, and ''acting on behalf of a foreign power,'' were some of the charges the prosecution put forward during the 18-hour trial of independent journalists Maseda and Oscar Espinosa Chepe and the dissidents Héctor Palacios, Marcelo López and Marcelo Cano.
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.
It all happened as a result of the recent executions of three young men, shot dead ''to prevent an American invasion'' -- as if Castro had become an Aztec priest who conjures fate by means of human sacrifices.
Suddenly, the mutiny was directed at García Márquez, the prior of Latin American literature. ''Where is García Márquez's signature, in the face of this limitless cruelty?'' everyone asked. The author first said that he repudiated the death penalty but then made clear his inalterable affection for the dictator.
Murderers also have friends, and García Márquez wasn't willing, like José Saramago, to break with the old tyrant just because of a handful of new victims and some fresh blood on the execution wall.
………………..How can someone justify the huge moral concession of traveling to Havana to support or show affection for the oldest of the Latin American executioners? Very simple: by rescuing one or two captives and, if possible, returning home with them in a suitcase and exhibiting them as a great diplomatic success.***
Big BUMP!
Today however, I understand why my dad and so many other good men have been incarcerated. I have cried so much that I felt my heart was breaking into one thousand pieces, I think that I will never again be able to cry, because right now I feel a great emptiness inside of me. Perhaps you are asking yourself why I am directing myself at you.
I will tell you that I do so for many reasons; one of them being the fact that you are a woman, and this allows me to speak to you as if I am speaking to a mother, mothers always understand better the suffering of their children. Another reason is that you are a journalist and a professional, dedicated to the cause of Liberty for our country in your radio program "Monday Communiqués With Cuba", with Mr. Agustin Tamargo, as well as in your other program; but the main reason why I write to you is than on more than one occasion, during your broadcasts, I have heard your voice break and I realize that you feel the anguish of our people, as if instead of living in a free country, you lived here, with us, and suffered with your own body and spirit our pain. That is a miraculous thing, and even difficult to comprehended.***
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