Posted on 12/20/2002 5:56:50 PM PST by Ragtime Cowgirl
My friend Oscar should be preparing to celebrate Christmas with his family, but right now he's in jail.
On Monday, December 2, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, who was a prisoner of conscience in Cuba from November 3, 1999 until this October 31. We discussed matters including the subjugation of black Cubans, Fidel Castro's anti-Semitic policies, and the biblical roots of civil disobedience.
That Friday evening, Oscar and approximately 12 Cubans went to a home in Havana to discuss human rights. This was part of Oscar's effort to establish "Friends of Human Rights" clubs throughout Cuba.
Police barred them from the home. To protest this violation of free association, Oscar and his peers sat on the street and declared, "Long live human rights" and "Freedom for political prisoners"
Then the police arrested them.
Most of those arrested have been released, but not Oscar. According to prosecutor José Ángel Aguilera, he will be charged with "disturbance of public order."
"I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth," Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail." He contrasted "a negative peace which is the absence of tension" with "a positive peace which is the presence of justice."
Like Oscar, King was arrested numerous times on charges like "public disorder" because he took nonviolent direct action against an oppressive system.
Oscar is also a practitioner of constructive tension; he highlights nearly 44 years of totalitarian injustice under Castro and promotes nonviolent action to rectify it. Just as King's indignation terrified Jim Crow elites, Oscar's terrifies Cuba's predominantly white master class. (If Cuba's elite functionaries reflected its demography, over 60% would be people of color.)
I wasn't surprised when I learned of Oscar's arrest; it was never a question of if but when. Had it been so inclined, the regime could have arrested Oscar four days after his release when he said, "So long as the dictatorship of communist Castro exists, we Cubans cannot live in liberty and democracy, and violations of human rights will continue."
The day after Oscar's arrest was the anniversary of Antonio Maceo's death in 1896 during Cuba's Second War of Independence. This black patriot once said, "Liberty is not begged for; it is conquered."
Oscar will never beg for his country's birthright.
During his recent visit to Cuba, NAACP president Kweisi Mfume met for two hours with a delegation of human rights activists including Oscar. The NAACP has been notified of Oscar's arrest, and what has Mfume said? Nothing.
And forget about solidarity from black celebrity "civil rights activists" like Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover; they were in Cuba last week for the Havana Film Festival. Belafonte asserted that Cuba has the "highest movie-making standards" and "censorship" is at a peak in America - interesting words to say in a regime that forbids independent cinema and media, where it's a crime to satirize Castro and his functionaries.
At the end of our conversation, I conveyed to Oscar these words from the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled." Behind bars, my friend's dream of justice endures.
And Harry Belafonte would clean the stall when he was done.
And this surprises who exactly?
………..AGAINST FORGETTING Cubans and Cuban-Americans feel a persistent hurt over the general American attitude toward them. One exile in Boca Raton reports that he can no longer talk with his Anglo neighbors about his homeland. "If I explain to them the reality of Cuban life, all I get is, 'Oh, you're a right-winger,' or, 'You're biased against President Castro.' Can you imagine being biased against the tyrant who deprives you of rights, throws you in jail, and makes life so intolerable as to force you into the open sea on a homemade raft? Many Cubans especially resent this honorific "President" before Castro, as if the dictator were the equivalent of a democratic leader. Worse is the affectionate, pop-star-ish "Fidel." We would never hear, for Pinochet, "Augusto." Gus!
The oppositionists and their supports are extraordinarily, even disturbingly, grateful for any sincere attention they receive. They are accustomed to being snubbed or defamed. Another exile writes, "Prisoners cling to newspaper articles about human rights in Cuba as their only hope against being abandoned and forgotten. The sense of helplessness, that no one is listening, that no one cares, is what kills their souls. I've known many such people, including within my own family."
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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