POLITICS-CUBA: Opposition Still Fragmented and Illegal

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Jan 4 1999 (IPS) - Four decades after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the political opposition remains fragmented and dispersed in small organizations that the government describes as “tiny groups at the service of Washington”.

Cuba’s political model “is impermeable to the articulation of an opposition”, Elizardo Sanchez, president of the illegal Cuban Commission for Human Rights and Reconciliation – created in the mid-1970s – said in an interview.

As in the countries of the former socialist bloc in Europe, the island’s political system is designed to prevent the formation of opposition groups because “any attempt to do means breaking the law”, said Sanchez, the opposition figure most sought after by the foreign press and visitors to Cuba.

He stressed that 40 years after the triumph of the Revolution on Jan. 1, 1959, “the political landscape in Cuba is more open than it was in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria or Hungary”.

Sanchez, who does not foresee opposition parties or trade unions being allowed in Cuba in the short or medium term, said he favored “a process of transformation under a political pact inside Cuba as well as in the geopolitical sense”.

Sanchez, a former professor of Marxism at the University of Havana, is a proponent of the idea that the Caribbean nation needs a “process of gradual democratic reforms” led by the government and the leaders of the Communist Party.

“If that process of transformation is not pushed forth deliberately and from within the powers themselves, the human costs could be very high,” he said.

This proposal, based on a notion of “national reconciliation on Cuba’s terms” launched in 1987 by internal dissidents willing to engage in dialogue, has been attacked by on various sides.

“The government says that it is counter-revolutionary because there is no one to reconcile here, and therefore the idea serves the interests of Washington,” while the more radical Cuban exile groups say “we are compromising with (President Fidel) Castro’s regime”, Sanchez said.

The Cuban opposition leader said that “in some circles in the United States, there is a kind of anti-Castro fundamentalism”, according to which “a Cuban politician who has dared to challenge Washington and still does so should pay the price”.

But he also stressed that there is a growing sector that is more liberal, “though by no means a majority, which favours a process of gradual democratic reforms in Cuba, even under the leadership of the current government”.

In his assessment of the last four decades, Elizardo acknowledged the existence of positive elements that should be preserved, and which have led “the majority of the Cuban people to support the Revolution”.

The negative elements, he said, include “the totalitarian model, a load which weighs heavily on the people and on the government itself”.

Among the positive things, he mentioned literacy, agrarian and urban reforms, universal education and health care, and “above all, the cultivation of a sense of solidarity among people” and “a reinforcement of the feelings of independence and national dignity that still endure”.

But much of the positive “has been eroded” over the years, he said.

Sanchez condemned the almost 40-year-old embargo that the United States has maintained against Cuba. “That policy has only succeeded is providing all kinds of arguments to the government for justifying the failure of the model,” he said.

The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and Reconciliation estimated in a report published in June that there are about 400 people in jail “for political reasons” in Cuba.

“In the past few years, the number of political prisoners has been steadily decreasing. Repression is now at a low, I would say the lowest in the entire history of this government, which does not really need to have so many people in jail for political reasons,” said Sanchez.