Don't Forget the Victims In Castro's Gulag

"Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski," Andrei Sakharov exclaimed when he met Jeanne Kirkpatrick in Moscow. "I have so wanted to meet you and thank you in person. Your name is known in all the Gulag."

The reason why, wrote National Review's Jay Nordlinger when he related that incident in June 2001, was because she had named names of Soviet prisoners, "giving men and women in the cells a measure of hope."

US deeply concerned by failing health of jailed Cuban dissident***He said Roque and the other 74 prisoners were being held in inhumane conditions, with little sanitation, contaminated water and nearly inedible food. "The Cuban government appears to be going out of its way to treat these prisoners inhumanely," Boucher said. "It should immediately cease this practice and, at the minimum, allow the appropriate humanitarian organizations to monitor the treatment of its political prisoners, whose only real crime was to call for peaceful democratic change in Cuba," he said. ***

CUBA'S POLITICAL PRISONERS - FREE THEM FROM INHUMAN PRISON CONDITIONS***The treatment of Martha Beatriz Roque, 57, the only woman among 75 dissidents convicted in a March crackdown, exemplifies what is happening. She was taken from her cell to a military hospital on July 24 suffering from high blood pressure and chest pains. Her sentence is 20 years for ''conspiring'' with a foreign power. Her crime? Speaking the truth about Cuba's moribund economy and totalitarian government.

Held at the notorious Manto Negro prison, Ms. Roque -- coauthor of the dissident manifesto, The Homeland Belongs to Us All -- has been kept in solitary confinement with no access to sunlight, according to Havana independent journalist Angel Polanco. She refused to drink filthy prison water and subsisted on water provided by her niece in monthly visits. Rats and cockroaches infested her cell, and her body was covered by an allergic rash.

Such prison conditions aren't unusual. Contaminated water and filthy cells are standard issue. Prisoners are moved hundreds of miles from home, turning family visits into odysseys. Visits then are permitted at the whim of prison authorities. ***

Fidel Castro – Cuba

Jay Nordlinger: Who Cares About Cuba?***Back in the Reagan years, Jeane Kirkpatrick became a heroine in the Soviet Union for the simple act of naming names on the floor of the U.N.: naming the names of prisoners, citing their cases, inquiring after their fates. Later, in Moscow, she met Andrei Sakharov, who exclaimed, "Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski! I have so wanted to meet you and thank you in person. Your name is known in all the Gulag." And why was that? Because she had named those names, giving men and women in the cells a measure of hope. Kirkpatrick says now, "This much I have learned: It is very, very important to say the names, to speak them. It's important to go on taking account as one becomes aware of the prisoners and the torture they undergo. It's terribly important to talk about it, write about it, go on TV about it." A tyrannical regime depends on silence, darkness. "One of their goals is to make their opponents vanish. They want not only to imprison them, they want no one to have heard of them, no one to know who or where they are. So to just that extent, it's tremendously important that we pay attention."

Indignation and concern are not inexhaustible, of course; no one, including Americans, can watch the fall of every sparrow (although, somehow, it seemed possible in South Africa). But American attention is a powerful thing; so is an American consensus. "Fidel will eventually die," some people say, with a shrug. But certain other people have waited long enough. ***

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