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Cubans to Venezuelans: Beware of Fidel's Mini-Me
By Mary Anastasia O'Grady

Venezuelans have a chance to head off Cuban style repression in today's recall election. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

August 13, 2004. If passions among Venezuela's opposition seem extreme in the run-up to

today's recall referendum on President Hugo Chavez, it is not without

good reason. From his presidential bully pulpit, Mr. Chavez virulently

rails against the U.S. as an international menace, sympathizes with

Middle Eastern militancy and, most frightening for Venezuelans, dreams

of making his country into another Cuba.

 

The process of Cubanizing Venezuela is well underway. As noted here

last week there is a lot of worry about the potential for government

fraud in the recall vote. Those concerns have increased as Mr. Chavez

has sharply limited the number of international election observers

allowed in the county. He is also harassing Sumate, an important

Venezuelan civic group, seeking to monitor the vote.

 

Of course, there will be other "observers." As Miami Herald columnist

Andres Oppenheimer noted on last week: "Among the 98 personalities

[Mr. Chavez] has invited to 'monitor' the election is Hebe de

Bonafini, the leader of the ultra-leftist wing of Argentina's Mothers

of the Plaza de Mayo, a self-proclaimed human rights activist who in

2001 publicly expressed her 'happiness' about the Sept. 11 terrorist

attacks on the United States."

 

Ms. de Bonafini, it is worth noting, is a strong supporter and close

political ally of Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, who recently

returned from hobnobbing with Mr. Chavez at a trade fair on

Venezuela's Margarita Island and whose government has refused to

condemn Cuba's human rights record at the U.N. Mr. Chavez seems to

also inspire Bolivia's militant left and Colombia's Marxist

guerrillas.

 

That the Venezuelan president, flush with oil income, aspires to be

Fidel's mini-me on the South American continent is chilling. In an

essay submitted for publication in Spain's ABC newspaper by Oswaldo

Paya, the leader of the Varela Project--a grass-roots movement in Cuba

calling for elections, free speech and private property--reminds us,

with grisly detail, of what Venezuelans have to fear.

 

Mr. Paya writes of his fellow Cubans: "Jose Daniel Ferrer, Leonel

Grave de Peralta, Normando Hernández Gonzalez and Diosdado Gonzalez

Marrero, are all prisoners of conscience. The first three were very

active in the Varela Project and today, August 8, they have spent

seventy-three days in individual punishment cells."

 

These "punishment cells" are a step down from "normal cells," Mr. Paya

explains. A normal cell is "1.8 by 3 meters with a door often sealed,

lots of mosquitoes, sometimes rats, a bed made of cement, and at the

same level, emerging from the wall, a plumbing outlet, barely a few

centimeters from the latrine."

 

Imagine then, the punishment cell. "In order to do this, the reader

should enter a closet with dimensions less than the "normal" cell,

leaving only a crack to breathe through and listen to the threats and

insults from your jailers. In just a few hours all the bones in your

body will be aching. This takes place in Pinar del Río, Cuba, at

Prisón del Kilometro Cinco y Medio, a prison sadly notorious for its

cruelty."

 

But it is not only such confinement that Mr. Paya describes as

disgracefully inhumane--it is also securing one's daily bread if you

are an ordinary Cuban. "The police do not search for arms or

explosives but rather for coffee, fish, cheese, rice; any product can

be confiscated or stolen without any recourse, except a fine or a

beating if the detained dares to demand the return of their

confiscated items that in many cases wind up in the homes of the

impounding police. . . .

 

"The situation of repression becomes even worse the greater the

privileges of the hierarchy, who now are the new and only employers,

the 'managers' of a country where they persecute an elderly widow for

selling pastries. The expectations of the future about Cuban

government policies are of 'squeezing harder.' Which in good Cuban

lingo means more repression and more oppression."

 

There are eerie parallels--though clearly more extreme in Cuba--to the

maltreatment of Venezuelans who signed the petition calling for this

Sunday's recall vote. "Cuban State Security has presently unleashed

throughout the entire country a repressive wave against the Varela

Project," Mr. Paya writes. "It's agents are visiting one by one the

25,000 signers of the Varela Project, whose contact information they

know since we turned in the petition with their information and

signatures to the National Assembly of Popular Power. They are

threatened. They try to force them to recant and some are fired from

their jobs. State Security has distributed lists among the Committees

in Defense of the Revolution (CDR) to keep them under surveillance and

maintain a file on these citizens who while in the exercise of their

constitutional right made this citizen's petition for a referendum."

Last week too, dissident Vladimiro Roca, the son of the late Cuban

communist party hero Blas Roca, echoed Mr. Paya's indictment. In a

message to the European Union, Mr. Roca warned that Castro is trying

to give the impression of tolerance by letting some seriously ill

prisoners go home. The goal, Mr. Roca says, is to get the EU to resume

economic assistance to the island and to sharply limit dissident

access to European embassies in Havana. Yet, as he points out, these

gravely ill prisoners have not had their sentences commuted. They

continue under house detention. All 75 prisoners arrested in the March

2003 crackdown against peaceful dissent remain prisoners. Mr. Roca

begs the EU and other countries not to ignore the Vienna Convention

and not "to permit the Cuban government to continue with the massive

violation of the human rights of the Cuban population."

 

Over 300 Latin American congressmen and former heads of state signed a

letter this month supporting the Cuban dissidents, condemning the

repression and asking that their embassies in Havana be open to the

oppressed. Such support, together with Europe's condemnation in recent

years, suggests wide recognition and rejection of Castro's latest

demonstration of brute power.

Yet totalitarian temptations remain alive and well in the region, as

the parallels between Cuba and Venezuela attest. Mr. Paya and Mr. Roca

are doing their best to warn their neighbors across the Caribbean Sea

of what Venezuela could become if Chavez isn't stopped.

 

Ms. O'Grady is a senior editorial page writer at The Wall Street

Journal and editor of the "Americas," a weekly column that appears

every Friday in the Journal and deals with politics, economics and

business in Latin America and Canada.

 

Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street  Journal © 2004

   Dow Jones & Company. All rights reserved.

 

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