Castro crackdown has dismayed countries that thought the regime was easing its hard line.

HAVANA - As a swift crackdown against Cuban dissidents brings global condemnation and the promise of further isolation, proponents of normal relations with the island regime are bewildered at Fidel Castro's rebuff of their efforts.

Seventy-five dissidents were convicted this month of being US-backed mercenaries conspiring to undermine the Cuban government. A roster of activists - whose offenses ranged from promoting uncensored libraries and private news services to advocating political reform - was handed prison sentences of as much as 28 years.

The harsh convictions hit particularly hard in the wake of perceptions the regime was softening its stance against internal dissent - as well as boosting informal ties with the United States. Now, Castro's actions are seen as a reminder that the dictator will tolerate no real challenge to his regime.

"Those who thought that Castro had mellowed with age were a bit naive," says Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. "He has always been willing to sacrifice international goodwill and the Cuban economy for state security."

In Washington, the Bush administration has condemned the crackdown. It also marshaled a rebuke of Cuba at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Committee last week, for both the political roundup as well as the recent execution of three Cuban hijackers who seized a Havana commuter ferry with the intention of sailing it to the US. Cuban security forces recaptured the boat and arrested the hijackers, without injury to the hostages.

The White House is reportedly contemplating ways to tighten its four-decade economic embargo against Cuba, while a number of other Western governments are expected to cut back diplomatic ties with Castro. The European Union has condemned the dissidents' convictions and demanded "those persons, whom it considers prisoners of conscience, be released without delay."

"We were dismayed watching the dissident trials. The executions put the lid on it," a European diplomat in Havana says. "There has been a real feeling of indignation and disappointment, a sense we simply cannot let this pass."

Indeed, the recent dismay with Cuba stands in marked contrast to the mood just a few months ago.

Last December, Oswaldo Paya, Cuba's leading democracy activist, was permitted to leave the island to receive a European peace award. On that trip, Mr. Paya met with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Pope John Paul II, and former Czech President Vaclav Havel as he built support for his Varela Project - a petition for human rights, freedom for political prisoners, and electoral reform.

That Paya was able to work, albeit with some government-imposed obstacles, was to many a sign that Castro was willing to countenance political reform. As Cuba's US-backed dissidents chalked up a number of modest triumphs, Castro, too, benefited from good publicity and was seen by many to be shrewdly chipping away at the US trade embargo that has so damaged his ailing economy.

A visit to Cuba last spring by former President Jimmy Carter was only the most widely publicized in a string of US congressional and state delegations over the past year that bolstered a campaign to repeal the embargo.

For Brian Alexander of the Cuban Policy Foundation, a group that wants the trade embargo lifted, Castro's charm offensive hit its peak last October when Havana hosted an expo of American agricultural products, which are exempted from the trade embargo.

"The Cubans got quite a lot of publicity at the expo, and there was a sense that the movement to end the embargo was growing stronger," Mr. Alexander says. "Now they have hit their base of support in Washington with a sledgehammer. Politically, Cuba is making the embargo a third rail. Politicians who went out on a limb for Cuba are feeling stunned and apprehensive."

Indeed, less than a year ago, the House of Representatives voted to block the administration from enforcing a ban on Americans traveling to Cuba, a measure that was interpreted as bolstering support for lifting the embargo.

But last week, the mood on Capitol Hill shifted dramatically. Both supporters and opponents of the embargo in the House voted unanimously, 414-0, to condemn Cuba.

For all the criticism of the political crackdown, many see recent events as just one example of a more far-reaching curtailment of freedom on the island as Castro consolidates power for his eventual successor, considered to be his brother Raul.

For many, it began with a widely publicized antidrug campaign of in January. Days later, Cuba's state-run media carried stories of a wider crackdown against black-marketeering enterprises, from massive garment presses and private kitchens to unlicensed landlords and repair shops outside the island's state-run economy. The few licensed private entrepreneurs on the island also came under scrutiny.

Most of the recently convicted dissidents were charged under Law 88, which promises tough sentences for Cubans convicted of conspiring with a foreign power. Those convictions and the summary execution of the boat hijackers, coming after a number of other incidents in which hijacked Cuban airplanes were given sanctuary in Florida, were seen as a reminder that Castro was unwilling to brook dissent.

"This is the sort of housecleaning that other dictators from Stalin to Mao have been willing to do before they go," Mr. Suchlicki says.

Scene from the Cuban crackdown - By Claudia Márquez ( Claudia Márquez Linares, an independent Cuban journalist, wrote a version of this article for CUBANET.ORG on March 20, two days after a roundup of dissidents began. Her husband, Osvaldo Alfonso Valdés, president of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, was one of 75 journalists and activists sentenced to prison for their pro-democracy work last week. Mr. Valdes showed repentance and was given an 18-year term. )

[Full Text] HAVANA - An authoritative fist knocked on our apartment door.It was State Security with a search warrant to look for what they called, "material proofs of an offense."

The head of the search, who said his name was Pepe, came in at 4:10 p.m., ignoring the fact that I was in my underwear. He stayed watching me, and I had to throw him out of my room to dress. He told me to be quick because he had a search warrant.

For 10 hours, 12 officers, two of them armed, searched our home. The fruits of their literary looting, now in a crammed warehouse of the Cuban government, were: hundreds of newspaper articles, journalism manuals, 150 books (politics, law, economy, social sciences), more than 50 envelopes containing Internet printouts, a video camera, a digital camera, an old laptop, 36 diskettes with the testimonies of victims of the legal whims of the Cuban government, and six compact disks, some containing the underground journal "De Cuba" published by our independent journalists' association, others containing the Encyclopedia of the European Union for Young People.

Even as these officials were going through my drawers and family photos, state television was broadcasting its daily "Round Table" talking-heads show, a chorus of denunciation of us as "traitors."

Over the course of the evening, these officers listened to the audiocassettes of my German lessons, and they took away all the bulletins of the Liberal International, an umbrella organization for all the liberal parties of the world, including my husband's.

They read the love letters that my husband, Osvaldo Alfonso Valdes wrote to me eight years ago; then they took him away from me like a trophy to the cells of the State Security in Havana, in Villa Marista.

It is true that anyone involved in civil society was always branded as "mercenary" and "counterrevolutionary" by the Cuban authorities - and 18 defenders of human rights have been held in custody without trial for over a year.

But what came as a surprise this week was that they would come and get so many of us. Was it because we reported on electricity shortages, on prostitution, on illegal detentions? Was it because we held a workshop on ethics in journalism, exercising our freedom of assembly? Or because we discussed with foreign visitors the political situation in Cuba? Because we dared to have an opinion and took the liberty of expressing it?

What are they afraid of? I ask myself this while in my conscience and in the consciences of the many journalists and leaders of organizations that were also victim of confiscations and arbitrary arrest - the hope remains for a free and democratic Cuba, where to read Vargas Llosa and Milan Kundera will not be "material proof of an offense." [End]

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Castro: Bush is "stupid" - Cuban Crackdown Deepens Strains With U.S.*** *** The Bush administration, unhappy about the Cuban action, is contemplating ways to make Fidel Castro's government pay a price. It also has undercut embargo foes on Capitol Hill.

"The embargo is still a bad idea, but changing it isn't going to happen any time soon," Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Monday.

Brian Alexander of the anti-embargo Cuba Policy Foundation said some House members who had entertained dissidents not long ago at a restaurant in Cuba's capital, Havana, were appalled to learn the waiters were state security agents who testified against the activists at their trials.

Cuba contends these dissidents, many of them independent journalists or directors of independent libraries, were subversives working hand-in-hand with the U.S. diplomatic office in Havana, led by career diplomat James Cason. Cuba says the dissidents were funded by the U.S. mission; the State Department denies it and says the mission's role is to seek a peaceful transition to democracy.

Neither Washington nor Havana pays much attention to diplomatic decorum nowadays. In Powell's references to the Cuban leader, he goes straight to "Castro," skipping "president." Castro says President Bush is "stupid." Each side has imposed travel restrictions on the others' diplomats lately. Cuba has even talked about shutting down the U.S. office in Havana and bringing its own envoys home from Washington.***

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Blocking a new axis of evil*** A new terrorist and nuclear weapons/ballistic missile threat may well come from an axis including Cuba's Fidel Castro, the Chavez regime in Venezuela and a newly elected radical president of Brazil, all with links to Iraq, Iran and China. Visiting Iran last year. Mr. Castro said: "Iran and Cuba can bring America to its knees," while Chavez expressed his admiration for Saddam Hussein during a visit to Iraq.

The new axis is still preventable, but if the pro-Castro candidate is elected president of Brazil, the results could include a radical regime in Brazil re-establishing its nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs, developing close links to state sponsors of terrorism such as Cuba, Iraq and Iran, and participating in the destabilization of fragile neighboring democracies. This could lead to 300 million people in six countries coming under the control of radical anti-U.S. regimes and the possibility that thousands of newly indoctrinated terrorists might try to attack the United States from Latin America. Yet, the administration in Washington seems to be paying little attention.***

*** For Brian Alexander of the Cuban Policy Foundation, a group that wants the trade embargo lifted, Castro's charm offensive hit its peak last October when Havana hosted an expo of American agricultural products, which are exempted from the trade embargo. "The Cubans got quite a lot of publicity at the expo, and there was a sense that the movement to end the embargo was growing stronger," Mr. Alexander says. "Now they have hit their base of support in Washington with a sledgehammer. Politically, Cuba is making the embargo a third rail. Politicians who went out on a limb for Cuba are feeling stunned and apprehensive."***

Left Wing Stooges create another front for Castro--[Excerpt] --In April, the "neutrality" of the CPF was questioned when it was honored by the officialist propaganda organ of the Castro dictatorship, Radio Havana. Radio Havana in its report ended up praising Grooms Cowal's efforts in starting the Cuba Policy Foundation by stating the following: "The Cuba Policy Foundation has challenged the ultra-right-wing Cuban-American National Foundation to a public debate concerning the merits of Washington's blockade of Cuba."

Snip

The CPF is bankrolled by the Arca Foundation. For those of you who don't know about the Arca foundation, it passes itself as a philanthropic organization that gives millions of dollars annually to organizations that fight for social justice around the world. Unfortunately a grand majority of these organizations are of a far leftist nature, like in 1998 when it gave $1,000 to an obscure contingent called Fondo Del Sol which helped surviving members of the Stalinist Abraham Lincoln Brigade view a photo exhibit on the Spanish Civil War! Among the pro Castro groups Arca has funded have been the Pastors for Peace ($10,000 in 1999), Global Exchange ($50,000 in 1999), and the TransAfrica Forum ($100,000).

Communist Cuba is the main focus of Arca's Foreign Policy grants list, and although it gives money to other international and domestic institutions, it annually gives a substantial amount of funds to causes dealing with communist Cuba. In 1999 alone, the Arca Foundation gave to over 19 organizations that are sympathetic to revolutionary Cuba. [End Excerpt]

Excerpted from Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left -Hillary Clinton and the Third Way …………..If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?

What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.

But you never had the honesty-then or now-to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual-both of which you despise.

It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.

Despite the homage contemporary leftists pay to post-modernist conceits, despite their belated and half-hearted display of critical sentiment towards Communist regimes, they are very much the ideological heirs of Stalinist progressives, who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves as civil libertarian opponents of McCarthy and victims of a political witch-hunt. (Only the dialectically gifted can even begin to follow the logic involved.)

To appreciate the continuity of communism in the mentality of the left, consider how many recent Hollywood promotions of the industry Reds and how many academic apologies for Stalinist crimes (in fact, the vast majority of recent academic texts on the subject) have been premised on the Machiavellian calculations and Hegelian sophistries I have just described.

Naturally, today's leftists are smart enough to distance themselves from Soviet Communism. But the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?

On the other hand, conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a product of the left's own deceits. It also reflects conservatives' inability to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and the power of its redemptive idea. For instance, I'm often asked by conservatives about the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas in our academic and political culture. Though still around and sometimes influential in the left, the Communist Party has been a minor player for nearly fifty years. How can there be a communist left (small "c" of course) without a Communist Party?

The short answer is that it was not the Communist Party that made the left, but the (small 'c') communist Idea. It is the idea, as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build a highway to Heaven. It is the idea of returning to an Earthly Paradise, a garden of social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and liberals of a tikkun olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song of the serpent in Eden: "Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you shall be as God."

The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them-this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so self-righteous.

And it did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of this redemption that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins of their Communist dreams.

It is this same idea that is found in the Social Gospel which impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. She later encountered the same idea in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Leftist who introduced her to the "politics of meaning" even after she had become America's First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children's Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.

For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.

Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.

But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.

No matter how opportunistically the left's agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which "social justice" prevails.

Snip

And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.

Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left-by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.

Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them. [End Excerpt] David Horowitz

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