In Cuba's Gulag - "He was as if blinded"

Cuban dissident Oscar Elías Biscet's offense was to openly advocate for human rights in Cuba. For that he is serving a 25-year prison term in sub-human conditions. The real crime here is how Cuba's dictatorship is torturing Dr. Biscet for his nonviolent opposition to its barbaric regime.

''Oscar has lost nearly 40 pounds, he is extremely pale and lacking in appetite . . . I didn't recognize my husband after not having seen him in four months,'' Elsa Morejón told El Nuevo Herald writer Wilfredo Cancio by phone this week. ``He hadn't seen light since Dec. 8; he was as if blinded.''

Ms. Morejón saw her husband on Dec. 30, but only after arguing with officials at Kilo 8 prison in Pinar del Rio. She threatened to stay in front of the prison and was allowed to see him -- for 15 minutes. Ms. Morejón had been allowed to see him only once before since his sham trial in April.

This isn't his first prison stint. A physician and long-time critic of the regime, Dr. Biscet served a three-year term for ''disrespecting'' authority, after staging a peaceful hunger strike in his home. Released in October 2002, he was out barely a month when, on his way to meet other human-rights activists, he was jailed again.

Now he's confined in a tiny, underground punishment cell. He is denied regular family visits, correspondence and packages of food, medicines, toiletries or clothing. All this for refusing to wear the uniform of a common prisoner and bow before cruelty.

The international community -- including diplomats, human-rights advocates, religious and civic groups -- must wage a vigorous campaign to free Dr. Biscet and other political prisoners so brutally abused by Cuba's regime.

A little Moore attention may backfire***Moore is the American slob in a baseball cap who likes to hint - only hint, mind - that President George Bush had a hand in the September 11 attacks.

Moore has a huge following on campuses on both sides of the Atlantic: he, more than anyone else, has persuaded British students that the occupant of the White House is, like, just such a moron.

Stupid White Men was the bestselling non-fiction hardback in Britain last year after the Atkins New Diet Revolution; it's now top of the paperback list. Bowling for Columbine, the feature-length documentary in which Moore blames a high school massacre on the Republicans, won an Oscar.

Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country?, offers his most sophisticated critique to date of American foreign policy: "We like dictators! They help us get what we want and they do a great job of keeping their nations subservient to our galloping global corporate interests."

It takes Moore just a couple of paragraphs to absolve Osama bin Laden of the destruction of the World Trade Centre. "How could a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan have plotted so perfectly the hijacking of four planes and then guaranteed that three of them would end up precisely on their targets?" he asks.***

Here's a vomit-inducing article on Castro by Arthur Miller.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040112&s=miller

Of course Miller can't help kissing up to mass murderers:

A Conference in New York

In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."

The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet organized and articulate opposition.

The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II.

Stealing the Show

A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.

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