Replies

Thought Crimes: Cuban Dissidents Reel Under 'Wave of Repression'*** "The U.S. is riding high. It thinks it can dictate to or run over anyone and ignore international law," said Wayne Smith, a former top U.S. diplomat in Cuba who is now at the Center for International Policy in Washington. "I'm sure the United States has no intention of having a go at Cuba. But I'm not sure the Cubans are convinced of that." Smith also said that Castro may be trying to tighten his control ahead of worsening economic times, which have historically led to unrest and attempts to flee the island. Cuba's sugar industry is barely surviving, and tourism is expected to drop significantly as the war continues. "There's a greater sense of uncertainty: Where is the money coming from?" Smith said. "So they are cracking down."

The sense of chaos has been heightened by the armed hijackings of two airliners and a ferry since mid-March. In the most recent incident, Cuban officials on Friday arrested several men who had hijacked a ferry with 50 passengers aboard and tried to make it to Key West before running out of fuel. Sanchez said the hijackings were "an expression of the discontent and desperation of the people of Cuba -- economic conditions are getting worse every day." The Cuban government has charged the dissidents with conspiring with the United States, citing their frequent meetings with James Cason, the top U.S. diplomat in Havana. Castro charges that the dissidents are funded by the U.S. government, which the State Department and the dissidents deny.

Paya and Sanchez said Castro is worried that the dissident community has grown from a few people to thousands willing to sign pro-democracy petitions. "Nothing they have done has been enough to paralyze this movement, and that's why they are scared," Paya said. Paya said he has gone daily to the courtroom where the trials are being held, but security forces have shouted obscenities at him and forced him to leave. Sanchez said he has tried to send observers to the trials but that security police stopped them before they could get within 100 yards of the building.

The extent of Castro's security network came into view Friday, when two reporters who spent years working alongside the country's best-known independent journalist, Raul Rivero, admitted at his trial that they were actually government agents. And in another trial, the secretary of dissident economist Marta Beatriz Roque also acknowledged spying for Castro.***

Hollywood's Darling, Liberals' Blind Spot***If the valiant Michael Kelly had not been killed in Iraq, he surely would have returned to whacking liberals and liberalism in his newspaper column. I would have read these columns -- it was hard not to read Kelly -- with some irritation but often with chagrin as well. When he said -- and I paraphrase him here -- that at the heart of American liberalism was a deep and inexplicable hole, I knew he was often right. Had he lived, he might have turned his attention to Cuba.

Just recently the government of Fidel Castro arrested about 80 dissidents and almost instantly brought them to trial -- if it can be called that. Foreign journalists and diplomats were excluded from the proceedings, in which 12 of the accused face life sentences. All of them are undoubtedly guilty of seeking greater freedom and on occasion meeting with visiting human rights activists. In Cuba, those are crimes.***