CUBA: Dissidents Call for Free Enterprise

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, May 21 2005 (IPS) - Over 100 Cuban dissidents attended a controversial two-day meeting organised by the Assembly to Promote Civil Society (APSC), where they launched a call for economic and social changes that would pave the way for political transition on this socialist Caribbean island.

The unprecedented meeting was held as the founding session of the APSC, a network of outlawed opposition groups. It kicked off on Friday with the participation of James Cason, the top-ranking representative of the United States in Cuba as head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

Several other foreign diplomats also took part as observers in the meeting, which was held at the home of dissident Félix Bonne in a suburb near the Havana airport.

At the opening session, the 105 delegates and several dozen activists in charge of organising the gathering watched a videotaped message from U.S. President George W. Bush congratulating them on their initiative. “We are helping organisations protect dissidents and promote human rights,” he declared in the taped message, prompting shouts of “Viva Bush!” from assembly participants.

“The road here was not easy. The government stopped a lot of delegates from other provinces from coming,” Angel Pablo Polanco, chair of the Assembly’s Freedom of Ideological Expression Committee, told IPS.

As of Saturday, the government had yet to comment on the expulsion of a number of European lawmakers and journalists who had travelled to Cuba to attend the dissident meeting.

A number of prominent international figures, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, had been invited to participate, but their requests for visas were inexplicably delayed, said sources from the APSC. Some 18 members of the European Parliament were also denied permission to enter the country.

The delegates to the assembly, divided into working groups, spent Friday and Saturday putting the final touches on a series of draft resolutions addressing such themes as the economy, health care, religion, the environment, and legal and ideological affairs.

One of the resolutions stated the need for “an economic and social transition that will lead to a political transition, with the goal of raising the standard of living of the Cuban people.”

The document, which did not contain any concrete information on the economic situation, emphasised the “positive role” that could be played by small and medium-sized businesses in promoting the development of civil society.

It also called on “those who will be responsible for carrying out the democratic transition in Cuba” to ensure that the “neediest” sectors of society are not hurt in the process.

Cuba’s socialist system provides free health care and education to all of the country’s citizens, and the loss of these benefits would have a heavy impact on many of its 11.2 million people.

However, another of the assembly’s resolutions claimed that the current health care system is in ruins, and criticised “politicisation” and “government interference” in the sector, which it said leads to a lack of motivation on the part of health professionals.

The document concluded by advocating the “definitive and effective structuring of a modern and prosperous Ministry of Health,” but did not explain how the system should be reformed, or if these efforts would include the privatisation of medical services.

With regard to education, criticisms of the current system focused on what the dissidents described as “indoctrination” and politicisation. “In the Cuba of tomorrow, schools should not be politically manipulated by the government in power,” stated the corresponding resolution.

For its part, the legal affairs commission attacked the Cuban penal system, demanding the immediate release of all “political prisoners” and the abolition of the death penalty.

Meanwhile, the working group addressing “ideological” freedom of expression stressed the importance of “unity among the Cuban dissident community,” although it added that this should be based on the democratic principle of respect for “diversity.”

The resolution adopted advised against the creation of a single opposition party, the selection of a single leader, or the merger of opposition movements to form stronger parties.

Nevertheless, it recommended immediate efforts to begin the process of unifying the opposition through alliances, coalitions and other organisational strategies that would allow for “the majority of the opposition in the country and in exile” to join forces.

The dissident community in Cuba is highly fractured and divided into numerous small groups, none of which are legally recognised by the government of President Fidel Castro, who considers them “mercenaries on the payroll” of the United States.

A number of other opposition groups refused to attend the meeting of the APSC, which is headed up by Martha Beatriz Roque, René Gómez Manzano and Félix Bonne.

In the 1990s, together with Vladimiro Roca, they made up the so-called Group of Four, which had signed a document titled “The Fatherland Belongs to All”, considered “subversive” by the socialist Castro government.

Roca, the son of late Cuban communist leader Blas Roca, spent five years in prison for “anti-government activities” before regaining his freedom in May 2002. Roque, Gómez Manzano and Bonne, who were sentenced at the same time, served shorter terms.

Roque was arrested again in March 2003 and tried along with 74 other dissidents, on charges of “conspiring with a foreign power” (the United States). But she was paroled for medical reasons in July 2004.

Roca attended the meeting as the spokesperson for Todos Unidos (Everyone United), another coalition of dissident groups. In his address to the participants, he stressed that all opposition forces should recognise the need to work together and support any anti-government project.

But some of Cuba’s most high-profile government opponents shunned the event, including Oswaldo Payá, recipient of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for human rights; Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, leader of Cambio Cubano (Cuban Change); and Manuel Cuesta, spokesman for Arco Progresista (Progressive Arc), a coalition of social democratic organisations critical of the confrontation between Washington and Havana.

In a harshly worded attack on the organisers of the two-day congress, the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) headed by Payá described it as “a fraud against the opposition, facilitated by the imprisonment of the majority of its leaders.”

“It is public knowledge that Martha Beatriz Roque and her two assistants (Gómez Manzano and Bonne) were working with state security agents and were supported by hard-line exile factions,” said the MCL in a communiqué Thursday.

The APSC congress was organised with financial support from various Cuban exile organisations, most of them based in the United States and recipients of U.S. government funding.

In addition to the personal greetings sent via videotape by Bush, the meeting was also endorsed by admitted anti-Castro terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, who described the meeting in Havana as “historical,” just before he was taken into custody by immigration officials in Miami this week.