In a flat on the potholed 25th street of Havana’s Vedado district, a group of women perch on plastic sofas discussing the solitary confinement cells of Cuba’s prisons and the 14 hours a year visiting time they get with their recently jailed dissident husbands.
The questions from the women — all wives of men arrested and jailed in what Amnesty International has denounced as the biggest crackdown against dissidence since the early years of Fidel Castro’s revolution — fly backwards and forwards.
How do you tell a six-year-old they will not see their father for up to 20 years? Should you allow yourself to be strip-searched before visits? How can you get proper medical care for a sick husband?
Claudia Marquez Linares, wife of the Cuban Liberal Democratic Party leader, Osvaldo Alfonso Valdes, is still bemused by his public ”confession” of guilt, later broadcast on state television, during the April trials.
”He told me they had threatened to arrest me too if he didn’t do it. They wanted him to say the Americans gave him cash, but he told them that was crazy,” she explained.
Claudia and the other women have come together at the house of Gisela Delgado ”for some mutual support”.
When police came for Gisela’s husband, Hector Palacios, in March they blocked off the street and set up floodlights. ”It was like a Hollywood film, as though they were coming for a group of terrorists rather than just one man,” she said.
They took stacks of documents, computer equipment and several thousand books — part of a so-called ”independent libraries” project which stocked the works of exiled authors such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Zoe Valdes. The books were, eventually, returned, but Palacios, who had already spent two shorter periods in jail, never came back.
The severity of his 20-year sentence for ”activities against the integrity and sovereignty of the state”, and of those, of up to 28 years, handed down to the others, has done more damage to President Castro’s support abroad than anything else for a decade.
The jailing of the 75 coincided with another event that shocked people abroad and in Cuba. On April 2, a group of 10 armed people hijacked the Cuarto Congreso ferry as it crossed Havana Bay with 50 passengers. They set a course for Florida where, under US legislation for Cuban exiles, they could have expected a warm welcome. But they ran out of fuel.
They were placed before a Cuban court, and three of the hijackers were shot at dawn three days later. Their families were only told afterwards.
”This represents a return to extreme repressive measures in use decades ago which cannot be justified, and which, ultimately, harm the Cuban people,” Amnesty said. It was not enough, however, to deter others. Last week three would-be boat-hijackers reportedly committed suicide after being cornered.
The fallout abroad from the executions and arrests came quickly. Some left-wing intellectuals, such as the Nobel prize-wunning novelist Jose Saramago, have publicly abandoned Castro.
According to the Cuban authorities the 75 were paid US agents, aiding a 40-year trade embargo that prevents food and medicines getting here, and receiving both money and instructions from US-government-funded anti-Castro groups in Miami. Some $19 000 was found at the homes of Palacios and another dissident — the family savings, according to their wives.
Castro has laid the blame for all this on James Cason, George Bush’s new man in Havana, whom the Cuban leader considers ”a bully with diplomatic immunity”.
Cason had invited the dissidents into his home, allowing them to run courses there and encouraging his staff to look after them.
”We never gave anybody any cash,” said one US diplomat. But, at the Independence Day party at Cason’s Havana mansion earlier this month, staff handed out bags that included, along with human rights documents, Tecsun short-wave radios. These were meant to help pick up foreign radio broadcasts. To many Cuban eyes, however, they were the black-market equivalent of a month or two’s salary.
The arrests have led to an unprecedented confrontation between the EU and Cuba that is being played out in what Havana diplomats call ”the cocktail party war”. Britain opened the hostilities when its ambassador, Paul Hare, invited dissidents to the star event in the British annual diplomatic calendar, the Queen’s Birthday party — forcing Cuban officials and dissidents into the same room, or at least the same subtropical garden. Other EU nations followed suit by inviting dissidents to all their national day parties.
Castro is blaming this standoff not on Tony Blair but on two recognisably right-wing figures, the Spanish prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, whom he calls ”the little Führer”, and Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
The dissidents are grateful for the EU support. ”I think there has been real waking up in Europe to what repression here is like,” said Gisela Delgado.
But do ordinary Cubans care about the dissidents? With the aid of the state-controlled media it has been easy to persuade Cubans, largely obsessed with the dollar and all it can buy, that the dissidents were only in it for cash and the chance of a Miami visa.
Some say the dissidents were fools to think they could outplay Castro. ”Who is going to be an opposition leader when they put you in jail for 20 years?” asked one disillusioned Havana chemistry student, who admitted he was just waiting for the 76-year-old Mr Castro to die.
The answer to that question is Osvaldo Paya, a dissident leader fired by deeply held Christian beliefs. Paya, who is closer to European countries than to the US, has another explanation for the recent crackdown. Many of those arrested were coordinators of the Varela Project, a referendum petition drawn up by him under the terms of the Cuban constitution and signed by 11 000 people.
It called for reforms to guarantee free elections, freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners and the right to sell labour freely.
The Varela project drew the ire of the Cuban authorities and of the exiled fundamentalists in Miami who saw it as too conciliatory.
”There is a culture of fear here, but this time thousands of people began asking for change,” said Paya.
Although Cuban authorities refused to accept the referendum petition, Paya insisted that the project would continue to develop, even without 40 jailed coordinators. The Varela network has already been rebuilt. Paya radiates both faith and optimism.
It is impossible to tell how many Cubans, if they could express themselves freely, would agree with Mr Paya. Few of those who do, however, seem prepared to take the risk.
They do not expect change until the ”biological solution” — Fidel Castro’s death by natural causes — happens. And that, they agree, may be a long time coming. – Guardian Unlimited Â