At Last, a Reckoning for Castro's Regime

Newhouse News ^ | 8/23/2006 | Brian Donohue

[Incorrigible]

The leaders of Cuba Archive are getting more and more leads, such as this photo of Gricel de la Torre from his son. De la Torre was killed in May 1962.

At Last, a Reckoning for Castro's Regime BY BRIAN DONOHUE

CHATHAM, N.J. -- For nearly five decades, Cuban-American opponents of Fidel Castro have been a powerful force in U.S. politics. They have won special treatment by the federal government for Cubans who enter the United States illegally, fought to maintain the trade embargo against Cuba and proven their Florida voting bloc can make or break a presidential campaign.

But in the 47 years of Castro's rule, one central, massive task has gone undone: counting the victims.

Today much of that work is under way in the unlikely setting of a Chatham townhouse. Maria Werlau, 46, spends her days there overseeing an effort to document the names and stories of those killed for opposing Castro's Communist regime.

The goal of the Cuba Archive project, now 8 years old, is to build a database of all the people killed trying to escape the revolution or fighting against it -- alleged executions, battlefield deaths, prison suicides and refugee boat sinkings. Two independent sources are needed to back each case.

It is believed to be the only comprehensive effort of its kind.

So far Werlau, a former banker, and co-founder Armando Lago, 66, a half-paralyzed Florida economist, have found more than 9,000 reports -- many confirmed, others still sketchy -- of people killed by the Castro regime.

They include more than 5,000 people killed by firing squad, many in the years immediately after Castro took power in 1959. Two thousand others are said to have died in prison -- some executed, others in accidents, some never explained.

An estimated 77,000 people have died trying to flee the island, some by drowning and others in boats that, Castro critics charge, were sunk by the Cuban military.

Researchers also hope to include roughly 3,000 people killed in the violence leading up to the 1959 revolution, including those killed by the forces of dictator Fulgencio Batista.

"This is the cost of violence, this is the cost of a society not resolving its problems in a peaceful manner," Werlau said. "Each one is a human story. We need to do a systematic effort, but we want to do the stories, the families left behind, the lives lost."

The growing list includes Amelia Fernandez Garcia, executed by one of the infamous firing squads that operated in the years after Castro took power.

There is Gricel de la Torre, 38, killed May 28, 1962, for his involvement in the Escambray uprising, a rebellion started by campesinos angered by the government's confiscation of their farms.

And on a special list reserved for children, there is Angel Abreu, 3, one of the 44 people who died in 1994 when the Cuban navy rammed and sank a tugboat that refugees had commandeered to take them to the United States. The Cuban government called the sinking accidental.

"There's no political message in this," said Lago, who has done the bulk of Cuba Archive research while recovering from a pair of strokes. "I'm simply counting the dead."

Since Castro was hospitalized and handed the reins of power to his brother Raul on July 31, Cuban exiles and human rights activists have grown more hopeful that Cuba is approaching an era of greater political and economic freedom.

Werlau hopes Cuba Archive will provide the framework, or at least a starting point, for a commission similar to the one in South Africa that investigated human rights abuses following the end of apartheid.

The obstacles are enormous.

The Cuban government remains among the most secretive in the world. Surviving relatives of many dissenters are afraid to provide information, fearful their kin remaining on the island would be punished.

The project also struggles financially, relying on a slow trickle of donations that only recently has begun to increase, in the wake of Castro's illness.

As they attempt to raise funds and awareness of the project, Werlau and Lago find themselves caught in the complex cultural and political crosscurrents of the Cuban exile community -- strongest in Miami but also numbering around 45,000 in New Jersey.

"Maria and I are kind of moderates, and they don't want to have anything to do with us," said Lago, speaking by phone from his home in Coral Gables, Fla. "There are guys here who want to start their own firing squads when they can go back to Cuba. We're trying to stop the violence."

Werlau, too, ponders why a community that rallies thousands to political causes like Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy who became the focus of an international custody battle in 2000, seems less willing to confront the grimmer truths of the island's history.

"We need to put the focus on the victims," said Werlau, seated inside the townhouse where she lives and works. "Unfortunately, Cuban exile groups have focused too much on the politics instead of those killed, their families. We have to remember this is not about us."

For Werlau, though, it is personal. Down the list of the dead, at File No. 1267, is the name of her father, Armando Canizares, killed during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

A staunch opponent of Batista, Werlau's father had fought alongside Che Guevara in the early days of the Castro-led guerrilla movement. Werlau's mother was active in the political wing of Castro's 26th of July Movement.

But in 1960, when Castro's new government began leaning decidedly toward Communism, Werlau's parents grew disenchanted and joined the thousands fleeing to Miami.

The following year, Canizares joined the force of Cuban exiles recruited for the botched U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. His body was never found.

Maria Werlau grew up in Miami, in a house with four cousins who had been whisked out of Cuba without their parents. Most of her mother's friends in the neighborhood were Bay of Pigs widows.

"I guess I inhaled this through every cell in my body, this whole drama," she said. "Every family tied to this has their own story."

In the early 1990s, while studying in Chile, Werlau took note as a government commission investigated the more than 3,000 political executions under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990.

She wondered why no one was doing the same for Cuba.

"It was so striking to me how outraged everyone was about Pinochet," she said. "But nobody talked about the dead in Cuba."

After returning to the United States, she searched for the details surrounding her father's death. That led her to Lago, a professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., who was already culling old U.S. State Department records and news clippings to build a tally of the dead.

Lago had interviewed Bay of Pigs survivors who said Canizares had been shot by Castro-led forces who ambushed their camp while they slept.

Lago had fled Cuba in 1960, too, at age 20, after he was arrested and questioned by police for arguing in a college class that deficit spending by the new Cuban government would cause inflation.

His father sent him to Harvard, where he earned a doctorate in economics.

Recalling meeting Werlau, he said: "When I told her about her father, she told me, `We need to formalize this. We need to really do this for everyone."'

In 2003, Werlau, a former second vice president at Chase Manhattan Bank with a master's degree in international relations, shelved her budding consulting business to run Cuba Archive full time. A divorced mother of three, she organizes the data and runs the business side of the operation. In Florida, Lago conducts much of the research by poring over books, old State Department documents, and decades of newspaper clippings and Cuban government publications.

As word of the project spreads, new leads trickle in. For instance, there's the hand-written letter from Alex Paredo, a Cuban exile now living in Miami, whose father was a scientist. The son believes Roberto Paredo Lopez was killed for raising ethical objections to experiments in the government-run lab where he worked.

"When my father disappeared I was 12 years old and very attached to him," Paredo's letter reads. "I was enrolled at Camilo Cienfuegos military school. I went home every weekend with the hope of finding him at home. It never happened."

On the Cuba Archive home page (www.cubaarchive.org) Werlau has posted a quote from Castro from a 2001 speech that she says fuels her fire.

"There have never been death squads in our country, nor a single missing person, nor a single political assassination, nor a single victim of torture," Castro said. "You may travel around the country, ask the people, look for a single piece of evidence, try to find a single case where the Revolutionary government has ordered or tolerated such an action. And if you find them, then I will never speak in public again."

Werlau scoffs, saying, "He puts out these lies with absolutely no remorse and no embarrassment."

She notes that Castro has publicly repeated the statement several times since the 2001 speech.

"I like to think he said that because of our work," she said. "Because he knows we are doing this."

Aug. 23, 2006

(Brian Donohue covers immigration issues for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be contacted at bdonohue@starledger.com.)

Not for commercial use.  For educational and discussion purposes only.

[Incorrigible]

"It was so striking to me how outraged everyone was about Pinochet," she said. "But nobody talked about the dead in Cuba."

Yes, striking indeed.

 

[Leg Olam]

"Since Castro was hospitalized and handed the reins of power to his brother Raul on July 31, Cuban exiles and human rights activists have grown more hopeful that Cuba is approaching an era of greater political and economic freedom."

Dream on. Raul was a commie before Fidel.

[frogjerk]

PEANUT BOY: "I'm having a Castro-gasm..."

[billorites]

There's going to be a terrible bloodbath of payback and retribution someday.

[T. Buzzard Trueblood]

on a special list reserved for children, there is Angel Abreu, 3, one of the 44 people who died in 1994 when the Cuban navy rammed and sank a tugboat that refugees had commandeered to take them to the United States.

God bless that poor little boy.