Cuba frees prisoners to improve image, economy
By Jeff Franks
HAVANA (Reuters) - The Cuban government's surprising decision to free 52
political prisoners enables President Raul Castro to reduce political
friction both inside and outside Cuba, and focus on pulling the island
out of financial crisis, Cubans and Cuba experts said.
Cuba's President Raul Castro waves to the crowd during the May Day
parade on Havana's Revolution Square May 1, 2010. The Cuban government's
surprising decision to free 52 political prisoners enables President
Raul Castro to reduce political friction both inside and outside Cuba.
(REUTERS/Enrique De La Osa/Files)
They said Castro appeared to be moving to put aside an issue that has
long damaged Cuba's international image, trade and diplomatic relations
to the detriment of its economy.
"I think the prisoners are being released for a combination of reasons,
but all related to the need for tourism, trade and investment to
alleviate the economic catastrophe that Cuba is sliding into,"
Miami-based attorney Timothy Ashby told Reuters.
"The prisoners, especially the hunger strikers, are an international
embarrassment and complicate relations with trading partners," said
Ashby, formerly a U.S. Commerce Department official in charge of trade
with Cuba and the Caribbean.
The immediate goals, he said, may be to send a positive signal to the
United States and Europe, where key decisions affecting Cuba could be
made in coming months.
Cuba wants the U.S. Congress to pass a pending bill that would end a
longstanding ban on Americans traveling to the island -- part of a
48-year-old U.S. trade embargo -- which could bring a flood of U.S.
tourists and much needed revenues to the cash-strapped island.
Recent visiting U.S. trade delegations said Cuban officials had urged
them to go back and lobby for the bill's passage.
Castro has sought improved relations with the European Union and pushed
for the group to amend its common position, which ties full economic
cooperation to the release of political prisoners and improved human rights.
His hopes for a change earlier this year, when Spain led the 27-nation
bloc, were dashed by human rights controversies, but the EU is to
revisit the issue in September.
STRUGGLING CUBAN ECONOMY
Castro "surely knows that a substantial prisoner release is likely to
draw a reaction from Washington and Europe, as it should," said Phil
Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute think tank in
Arlington, Virginia.
The Cuban leader, who succeeded his older brother Fidel Castro as
president in 2008, has his hands full trying to modernize Cuba's
economy, battered by damaging hurricanes, the global financial crisis
and chronic inefficiencies.
He has taken small steps toward economic reform and there have been
hints of larger ones to come.
But since Feb. 23, when imprisoned dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo died
in a hunger strike seeking better jail conditions, Cuba has been widely
condemned for its human rights record.
Zapata's death was followed immediately by a long, life-threatening
hunger strike by dissident Guillermo Farinas. Government-directed
harassment of the dissident "Ladies in White" group during March and
April marches by the women also added to the international criticism of
Cuban authorities.
Both Farinas and the Ladies in White were demanding the release of
prisoners included in the 52 to be freed.
The prisoner release has, for now, quieted foreign critics and may help
Castro focus on economic improvement, said Anya Landau French, a Cuba
expert at the New America Foundation think tank in Washington.
"Why is Raul doing this? It could be because of internal or external
backlash, or to get a distraction off their plate while they focus on
the economy," she said.
REACTION AGAINST STAGNATION
Farinas ended his hunger strike the day after the releases were
announced. Ladies in White leader Laura Pollan said on Sunday the group
will continue its weekly protest marches until Cuba frees all of its
estimated 167 political prisoners.
But the group's central issue was the release of the 52, their sons and
husbands arrested in a 2003 crackdown.
Cuba wants to send the freed prisoners and their families to Spain, and
so far most have accepted the offer. That means many of the Ladies in
White may soon be gone.
Dissident Miriam Leiva said freeing the prisoners both "resolves a great
injustice" and reduces an issue "that has stood in the way of any type
of internal or external opening."
"The Cuban people have a lot of opinions ... and I think even in the
goverment that this society cannot continue to be stagnant," she said.
Ashby said the release indicated that new blood was beginning to assert
itself in the Cuban leadership.
It "signals a broader change in the sense that the younger,
business-oriented generation of Cubans in positions of government
leadership are uncomfortable with archaic repression and the commercial
complications it creates," he said.
But it remained to be seen, experts said, how the United States will
respond to the prisoner release.
Washington has demanded the freeing of political prisoners as a
condition for improved relations, but may not be in a mood for major
change due to the detention in December of U.S. contractor Alan Gross in
Cuba on suspicion of espionage.
U.S. officials and his employers have said he was not a spy but was in
Cuba facilitating Internet access to Jewish groups.
"I don't know if this (U.S.) administration, timid and not very active
so far regarding Cuba, will respond," Peters said.
(Reporting by Jeff Franks; Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Todd Eastham)
No comments:
Post a Comment