Ignacio Ramonet is right that public protests haven't erupted in Cuba since Fidel Castro handed power to his brother last year (“Was Fidel Good for Cuba?” January/ February 2007). But that isn't because Cubans don’t want change. It's because Castro's repressive machinery remains fully intact. Cubans know what they can expect when they call for change: surveillance, harassment, mob violence, loss of employment, enforced separation from family abroad, and prison.
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Ramonet is also right that Castro's Cuba has made important progress in education and healthcare. But he’s wrong to suggest that these advances justify the systematic denial of fundamental freedoms. A high literacy rate doesn't justify punishing people, as Cuba does, for what they write. A low infant-mortality rate doesn't justify holding doctors hostage on the island, as Cuba does, denying them permission to visit relatives abroad on the grounds that their brains are "government property."
Ramonet is right that the U.S. embargo on Cuba has been an unmitigated failure. The embargo has hurt ordinary Cubans and only benefited Castro's government, providing it with an excuse for its problems and a pretext for its abuses. Washington's heavy-handed policies have allowed Castro to play the part of a Latin American David standing up to the American Goliath, a role he exploits brilliantly to win supporters abroad. Take Ramonet himself, for example. Here is a leading European journalist actually defending a government that for decades has denied its citizens the right to practice his own profession: independent journalism. Carlos Alberto Montaner, meanwhile, is too optimistic in his prediction for Cuba. It will take more than Castro's death to bring change to the island. Even an end to the U.S. embargo will not be enough. What's needed now, more than ever, is a measured and multilateral effort by the international community aimed at pressing Cuba to respect the basic freedoms it has denied its people for so long.
-José Miguel Vivanco
Executive Director, Americas Division
Human Rights Watch
Washington, D.C.
-Daniel Wilkinson
Deputy Director, Americas Division
Human Rights Watch
Washington, D.C.
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It is difficult to believe that a blatant defender of Fidel Castro's totalitarian dictatorship -- like Ramonet -- still exists. Ramonet's defense of totalitarianism is extreme and caricaturesque. His justification of a people's subjugation with the allegation that Cubans have not "rebelled" against their oppressors is inconceivable. To make such an argument when Cuba's prisons remain full of men and women of all ages because of their opposition to the totalitarian regime is disgraceful. It would be more appropriate for Ramonet to "stop looking at Cuba through an ideological prism and twisting the facts to fit in with a preconceived scheme of things," as he himself writes in reference to Montaner's well-informed and reasoned analyses.
Castro has instituted a totalitarianism in Cuba unprecedented in its ferocity in the Western Hemisphere, a racist regime that constitutes the historical revenge of Spanish colonialism. In Cuba today, young black men are routinely rounded up and thrown in prison without charge under Castro’s policy of "preventive detention." Hundreds of political prisoners languish in Castro's dungeons while Ramonet defends their jailers.
It should surprise no one that the Castro family has been purchasing significant landholdings in Spain and transferring hundreds of millions of dollars to foreign bank accounts. They, more than anyone else, know that their era is coming to an end.
-Lincoln Diaz-Balart
R-Florida
Member
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C.
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During the years that Cuba benefited from its markedly favorable trade relationship with the Soviet Union, it developed the most egalitarian society in the world. Its citizens couldn't speak their minds, perhaps, but they were guaranteed food, housing, free healthcare, and education. Fifteen years after the Soviet Union disappeared, the Cuban Revolution is still going strong, and the country's economy is posting impressive growth: 8 percent in 2005, and closer to 12 percent in 2006. Cuba has new and crucially important economic relationships with Venezuela and China. The price of nickel, one of the country's main exports, is at an all-time high, and a new oil field is being developed off its north coast, with other nations already bidding for drilling rights.
The expectation in Miami and Washington has always been that if Castro disappeared from the scene, the whole revolutionary edifice would come tumbling down. Certainly, it was said, the Cuban people would never accept Raúl Castro's rule. Wrong again. Seven months later, there has been not a single sign of unrest. We would of course all like to see Cuba move in the direction of a more open society with more civil liberties for its people. But the Bush administration's policy of threats and pressures is exactly the wrong way to achieve that. We could achieve far more by reducing tensions, opening travel, and beginning a dialogue.
-Wayne Smith
Senior Fellow
Center for International Policy
Washington, D.C.
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