Human rights under abuse in Cuba

Posted on Monday, 04.22.13
The Miami Herald | EDITORIAL

Human rights under abuse in Cuba
By The Miami Herald Editorial
HeraldEd@MiamiHerald.com

The State Department's latest report on human-rights practices
effectively puts the lie to the idea that the piecemeal and illusory
changes in Cuba under Gen. Raúl Castro represent a genuine political
opening toward greater freedom.

If anything, things are getting worse. The report, which covers 2012,
says the independent Cuban Commission on Human Rights and Reconciliation
counted 6,602 short-term detentions during the year, compared with 4,123
in 2011. In March 2012, the same commission recorded a 30-year record
high of 1,158 short-term detentions in a single month just before the
visit of Pope Benedict XVI.

Among the many abuses cited by the 2012 report are the prison sentences
handed out to members of the Unión Patriotica de Cuba, the estimated
3,000 citizens held under the charge of "potential dangerousness,"
state-orchestrated assaults against the Damas de Blanco (Ladies in
White), the suspicious death of dissident Oswaldo Payá and so on.

As in any dictatorship, telling the truth is a crime: Independent
journalist Calixto Ramón Martínez Arias, the first to report on the
cholera outbreak in Cuba, was jailed in September for the crime of
desacato (insulting speech) and remained there until last week.

The regime is willing to undertake some meek economic reforms to keep
people employed. It has even dared to relax its travel requirements to
allow more Cubans to leave the country if they can get a passport.

Both of these are short-term survival measures, designed as escape
valves for growing internal pressure. But when it comes to free speech,
political activity and freedom of association — the building blocks of a
free society — the report is a depressing chronicle of human-rights
abuses and a valuable reminder that repression is the Castro regime's
only response to those who demand a genuinely free Cuba. Fundamental
reform? Not a chance.

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