By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 11 2003 (IPS)

Cuba’s ongoing crackdown against leading dissidents has badly set back hopes among U.S. policy critics here that Congress would poke new holes in the 42-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Havana.

And Friday’s execution of three men who hijacked a commuter ferry Apr. 2 in an aborted attempt to sail to Florida is not likely to help, according to anti-embargo forces here. Human Rights Watch (HRW) charged Friday that both the executions and the trials amounted to serious violations of human rights.

”They’re over-reacting and painting themselves as a rogue regime,” said Wayne Smith, who served as head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana in the late 1970s and early 1980s. ”And now I’m afraid the Bush administration will try to provoke them to even greater extremes.”

”I think we’re entering a very dangerous period,” he added.

While Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flake, a leader in the anti-embargo movement on Capitol Hill, has said he still plans to introduce legislation that would permit U.S. citizens to travel to the Caribbean nation, the chances of broad support for such a move – which was endorsed by both houses of Congress over the last two years – have been sharply reduced as a result of recent events.

”How can people justify trying to get dollars for a regime engaged in a Stalinist crackdown?” asked Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a staunch anti-Castro Cuban-American.

Earlier this week, the House of Representatives voted 414-0 to condemn the Cuban government’s arrests and trials of some 80 democracy activists, independent journalists and private librarians. Both Amnesty International and HRW have described the repression as the most severe in more than a decade.

Some of Cuba’s most prominent dissidents, especially those most favoured by Washington, have already received heavy prison sentences of between 12 and 27 years for a range of offences from ”provocation” to carrying out ”subversive activities” with the head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, James Cason.

Why the government of President Fidel Castro is carrying out the crackdown now is the source of considerable speculation here.

Some believe that Castro is trying to take advantage of the international media’s focus on the war in Iraq to strike hard against the opposition in hopes that the backlash would be muted.

"That dictators move in times of world crisis comes as no surprise,” wrote Aryeh Neier, president of the New York-based Open Society Institute (OSI) in the ‘New York Times’ last weekend. He pointed to similar crackdowns in Zimbabwe and Belarus in recent weeks.

Smith, who is now based at the Center for International Policy (CIP), a liberal think tank here, says he believes the administration of President George W. Bush is deliberately trying to provoke the regime, although he does not believe Washington intends military action.

Nonetheless, the administration may be pursuing a strategy of tension against Castro, including the reported statement Thursday in Santo Domingo by the U.S. ambassador there, Hans Hertell. ”I think what is happening in Iraq is going to send a very positive signal, and it is a very good example for Cuba," he told local media.

Analysts here point to the arrival late last year of Cason in Havana, where he has held unusually public meetings with selected dissidents, going so far as to host their meetings and seminars for them.

With the economy in a major downturn resulting both from post-Sep. 11 blows to tourism and the shutdown of much of Cuba’s fabled but unprofitable sugar industry, the authorities have become increasingly sensitive about signs of unrest.

In this view, Cason’s conspicuous catering to the opposition, coupled with Washington’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy stance, was seen as a direct challenge to Havana’s authority.

”These arrests send a message to Washington that the government won’t stand by and permit the U.S. to actively and publicly build opposition,” said Geoff Thale, a Cuba specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a human rights group that has long favoured dialogue between the two countries.

Indeed, some analysts believe that Washington tried deliberately to provoke Castro into a crackdown precisely to relieve growing pressure to lift key elements of the embargo and possibly prepare the ground for stronger measures.

”We can understand how the Government of Cuba has perceived some of Amb. Cason’s actions – such as meeting publicly with dissidents while criticising their government to the press – as provocative,” said WOLA Director Bill Spender. We know from experience that such actions do not have the effect of advancing human rights or opening political space in Cuba.”

But, like other anti-embargo activists, Spencer said that Havana’s reaction has been far too severe. WOLA called for the immediate release of all detainees rounded up over the past three weeks, adding that the charges against them ”appear to criminalize the expression of political opinion”.

”The Cuban reaction goes much too far,” Smith told IPS on Friday. ”You might have expected the government to arrest some of these guys and put them in jail for six months, but arresting the whole community and now executing the three hijackers is really an overreaction.”

”It’s a matter of shooting themselves in the foot; they’ve done exactly what the Bush administration had hoped,” he added.

Flake said he actually was not surprised by the harshness of the repression, and other analysts have said Castro has periodically found ways to confront Washington as a way to mobilise the population. In 1996 for example, Cuban jets shot down two small planes belonging to an anti-Castro exile group, precipitating a major crisis that resulted in quick approval by the U.S. Congress of the Helms-Burton Act, which tightened the embargo.

But in addition to raising tensions with Washington, Castro also risks alienating key trading partners in the European Union and Canada with this latest crackdown, says one European diplomat here. His latest moves may also bolster Washington’s efforts to get a strong resolution of condemnation approved by the United Nations Human Rights Commission, which is currently meeting in Geneva.

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