| Bush New Cuba Initiative Caused Dissident Crackdown By Ronald J. Morgan Anyone looking for an explanation for the recent arrest and harsh sentencing of 75 persons involved in Cuba's incipient civil society movement has to consider the role being played by the United States in financing and training members of the group. President George Bush and his friends in the Miami exile community decided to adopt as their own, the group of independent journalists, independenct library operators and promoters of Cuban constitutional and electoral law changes which have been operating on the island in recent years. First under provisions of the Helms Burton Act and more recently, under the Bush Initiative for a New Cuba, announced in May, resources and training for dissidents have been growing rapidly. Close identification with the Unites States and the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba has pushed the here-to- fore tolerated groups into the abyss and have resulted in life prison sentences for some. While the visit of former President Jimmy Carter to the island last summer seemed to point to an advance in the discussion of U.S.-Cuba relations and human rights, the arrival in September of the new U.S.Interests Chief James Cason immediately increased tensions. The Cuban government has taken offense to Cason´s confrontational approach and frequent meetings and assistance to the dissidents. Causing particular pique, apparently, was an early cocktail party where Cason informed dissidents that they were the future of a soon-to-be democratic Cuba and later statements that Fidel Castro fears free expression. Cuba first restricted the travel of Cason and then in mid-March ordered its state security agents to round up a large portion of the incipient opposition. The United States has responded with restrictions on Cuban diplomats in the United States. Paradoxically, it has also initiated a crackdown on free exchange of people and ideas of its own. New restrictions on American travel to Cuba, are ideologically-based and are aimed at slowing neutral and pro-Cuba exchange visits to the island. At the same time allowable pro-dissident travel and financing is being expanded and encouraged. Adolfo Franco, Assistant Administrator for Latin America & Caribbean Affairs for the US Agency for International Development outlined the U.S. assistance to dissidents before a hearing of the House Western Hemipshere Subcommittee on February 27. In outlining the Cuba program Franco said, AID had "helped train over one hundred of Cuba’s independent journalists and published thousands of their reports on the internet as well as in hard copy for distribution on the island; sent international human rights monitors to the island to help build solidarity with Cuba’s human rights activists and to report to the international community the Cuban Government’s violations of human rights." It also "developed research papers, conferences and seminars on transitions to democracy in other countries to exchange information relevant to the future Cuban transition and share those lessons with the Cuban people." Since 1997, AID has provided $20 million in funding to U.S. Universities and nongovernmental organizations working to promote human rights on the island, Franco said. More than one million books, newsletters, videos and other informational materials on democracy, human rights and free enterprise have been sent to the Cuban people. More than 7,000 short wave radios have been provided to Cuba’s human rights activists, independent journalists and independent Cuban non-governmental organizations, he added. More than 50,000 pounds of food and medicine has been sent to the families of political prisoners and other victims of repression. While this was overt pro human rights assistance it identified the new civil society groups as U.S. sponsored. Recently, the Bush Administration pushed the pro-dissident effort a few notches higher by expanding "the list of licensable humanitarian activities for Americans traveling to Cuba to include construction projects intended to benefit legitimately independent civil society groups (Read U.S. approved dissidents) as well as educational training within Cuba and elsewhere on topics including civic education, journalism, advocacyand organizing." The arrests in Cuba brought immediate condemnation from the Interamerican Press Association (whose vice president for Press Freedom, is Cuban Indpendent Journalist Raul Rivero, one of the many arrested and facing a twenty-year sentence);the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists. But none of the groups, some of whom worked for years to re-establish news bureaus in Cuba, adequately confront the problem of the close identification of the independent journalists and other dissidents with the United States. Whether participants in U.S.-financed journalism and civil society activities are spies formenting rebellion on behalf of Cuba's enemies was not judged by U.S. standards. The penalties imposed by Cuban terrorism courts are outrageous -- the result of an 1999 Cuban law passed in response to the U.S. Helms Burton legislation known as law 88. But the Bush Initiative for a New Cuba ignored the reality of the existing Cuba -- A country that views the United States as its greatest enemy. ### _ |