HAVANA —
President Obama’s outreach to Cuba, intended to open doors for human
rights and political activists here, has also opened divisions within
the island’s small, tight-knit dissident community.
While many here see opportunity in restored diplomatic ties and expanded U.S. trade and travel to Cuba, others charge betrayal.
Their
disagreements mirror those in the United States. Critics, led by Cuban
American lawmakers, charge that Obama has sold an end to five decades of
estrangement with Cuba too cheaply. But the new policy has garnered
bipartisan support from many in Congress, as well as from a wide range
of U.S. business and human rights leaders.
As State Department
officials met with their Cuban counterparts here late last month,
activist leaders held competing news conferences. The Cuban Patriotic
Union, or UNPACU, the island’s largest dissident organization, posted
man-on-the-street interviews on YouTube.
“I think it’s positive,”
said one man who, like the others, was unidentified. “The United States
above all governments in the world can help alleviate the misery we
have here. . . . I like President Obama. I think he’s a good guy.”
A
woman in a pink sundress said no one here would benefit. “What’s going
to survive is the [Cuban] government. We’re not going to see any
change.”
Despite ongoing arrests and sharply limited freedom of
expression and assembly, Cuba’s repressive system has lightened up
somewhat in recent years. Cellphones and the Internet, though restricted
and primitive, have nonetheless given dissidents new ways to
communicate with each other and the world.
While dozens are still
serving lengthy prison sentences imposed in decades past, the
independent Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National
Reconciliation recorded 178 political detentions in January, virtually
all of them lasting a few hours or days before release, the lowest level
in years.
A decade ago, “10 people in the street” was a major
demonstration, said Commission head Elizardo Sánchez, 69, “Now there are
thousands of us.”
José
Daniel Ferrer, 44, the executive secretary of UNPACU, thinks that the
opening is good news for dissidents — provided the United States keeps
up its human rights pressure.
Some of his organization’s 5,000
members have doubts, he said. But “only 200 to 300 are thinking of
leaving” the group to protest its approval of the U.S.-Cuba agreement.
One of them may be Felix Navarro Rodriguez, a farmer and teacher in his late 50s from Matanzas province in central Cuba.
Since the Dec. 17
announcement of a move to normalize U.S.-Cuba relations,
which came after 18 months of secret talks, “only one side has
benefited — the government of Cuba,” said Navarro, who like Ferrer was
arrested during Cuba’s “Black Spring” of 2003 and held until 2011.
“What’s no secret is that the jails here are still full,” he said. “The United States has turned its back on these people.”
Diverse opposition
Beyond
the in-your-face demonstrations of UNPACU, whose members march and
distribute manifestos openly on the street, there are activist
organizations here that eschew confrontation.
The founders of
Cuba Posible, a Catholic Church offshoot, consider themselves
facilitators. They publish a magazine and hold “dialogues” between the
government and its critics over big issues such as constitutional and
economic reform.
Although the government of President Raúl Castro
does not endorse the effort, it has begun to tolerate some criticism
and calls for change, as long as they do not challenge basic Communist
Party control.
Many university professors, economists and other
professionals — virtually all of whom work for the government — are
privately disdainful of Cuba’s frozen political and economic systems.
But few risk acting on their frustrations.
Educated young people
chafe at the limited Internet and the lack of consumer goods, scoffing
at the government’s insistence that the U.S. embargo is responsible. But
political activism for many hardly seems worth the trouble in what
remains a closed system.
Ferrer has his own theory to explain a
relative lack of active political dissent over the past 50 years — the
same “learned helplessness” that CIA interrogators tried to engender in
terrorism suspects with extended isolation and harsh treatment.
Restrictions
on civil and political liberties here have been so tight, and the
internal security system so pervasive for so long, he said, that many
Cubans have lacked the motivation to speak out and “don’t see an exit.”
“We were all born into this system,” Ferrer said.
For
some, the only exit has been to leave. Since the normalization
announcement, and rising fears that special U.S. treatment of Cuban
exiles will dissolve, there have been
spikes in the number of Cubans leaving the island, along with those who gain permission to travel abroad and never return.
Antonio
Rodiles, 44, is one who did come back. After studies in Mexico and the
United States, he returned to Cuba in 2010 to campaign for Cuban
ratification of international conventions on civil and political rights,
and he founded State of SATS (the term is a Scandinavian theater
reference). The organization hosts interviews and panel discussions
among dissidents, intellectuals and cultural figures that are posted
online, along with news and articles written by Rodiles and others.
Although
most Cubans have no Internet access, material is distributed via
downloads from laptops, flash drives and connecting cables that Cubans
string from house to house.
In late 2012, Rodiles was roughed up
and arrested by state security personnel when he went to their
headquarters to inquire about a detained colleague. He was released
after 19 days.
Like Navarro, he is scornful of the secret
negotiations, about which activists here and Cuban exiles abroad were
neither consulted nor informed. The Obama administration, Rodiles wrote
after the announcement, clearly considers Cuba’s activists “incapable of
assuming our own political responsibilities, anchored in the past and
wishing that foreign governments would come and make the necessary
changes.”
Sense of hope
Yoani Sánchez,
39, also came back, returning from Switzerland to become Cuba’s
best-known blogger on political issues and human rights, at least among
overseas readers. Most of what she produces is often blocked here. Her
husband, Reinaldo Escobar, is one of a number of activists who have been
briefly detained since the Dec. 17 announcement.
But Sánchez sees promise in the new relationship with the United States.
“What
I’ve perceived on the streets is a sense of hope in a country that had
lost it. There are people who think this will bring Internet, or
economic improvements,” she said. “Everyone has their own hopes. It’s
been positive, but there’s still much, much more to be done.”
Sánchez
describes the activist community as pluralistic, rather than divided.
“Within the Cuban government, there are lots of people who don’t agree
with each other, too. But they can’t say so openly.”
Some
activists welcome criticism from American lawmakers such as Sen. Marco
Rubio (R-Fla.), who will chair a congressional hearing on the issue
Tuesday. But others dismiss U.S. opponents as self-serving and out of
touch with Cuban reality.
“I think that to the extent they try to
stimulate the opposition here, they’re endangering the Cuban people,”
said Miriam Leiva, an activist and independent journalist whose articles
are published on U.S.-based Web sites. “The people who know what’s
going on here are the people who live here.”
Leiva worked for the
Foreign Ministry until 1992, when she was fired, she said, for
“expressing my ideas.” She helped found the Ladies in White movement
among families of political detainees when her husband, government
economist and diplomat turned dissident Oscar Espinosa Chepe, was
arrested during the Black Spring. He was released 19 months later for
health reasons, and he died in 2013.
Leiva still supports the
Ladies in White, although she disagrees with its current leader, Berta
Soler, who has criticized the opening with the United States and has
refused to meet with U.S. officials here.
“Not everybody here
agrees with everything,” Leiva said. “The reality is that so far the
situation in Cuba hasn’t changed. There is great repression and tension.
But, yes, there is hope.”
A continuing fight
Ferrer,
the UNPACU leader, began dissent early, listening to shortwave
broadcasts from the BBC and Voice of America as a child in rural
Santiago province on Cuba’s southern shore. That led to making tape
recordings of broadcasts, spreading the word with an old typewriter and
carbon paper, attending and organizing protests, and finally his 2003
arrest.
“Everybody
has their own story,” he said of Cuba’s dissidents. “Some are looking
for an escape route, principally to the United States. Others have
wanted to look for liberty inside Cuba. But the majority opted not to
confront” the powers that be.
Ferrer said he and others are
trying to temper Cubans’ enthusiasm about the opening with the United
States — reminding them that it is not the end of their problems.
“Lots
of Cubans are very excited and think their problems are going to go
away,” he said. “We’re telling them, you might get another slice of
bread, but if you don’t fight for your rights, it’s going to have a
bitter taste.”
The U.S. government, Ferrer said, has a role to
play by continuing to show solidarity with the dissidents. And when the
tourists start to come, “tell them to bring printers and ink cartridges.
. . . Bring a DVD with the latest truthful news about Cuba and give it
to the first Cuban you see. That’s a way to help.”
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