CUBA: Dissidents Complain of ‘Disproportionate Reaction’ to Protests

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Jul 14 2005 (IPS) - Dissidents in Cuba said Thursday that the response to protests by opposition groups marking the 11th anniversary of the sinking of a hijacked tugboat was “disproportionate”.

“It was a show of muscle on the part of the government,” Elizardo Sánchez, with the dissident Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, told IPS. He was referring to the reaction by government supporters to two demonstrations held Wednesday in the capital.

According to Sánchez, several dozen demonstrators were “overwhelmed” by the “rapid response brigades” made up of civilian supporters of the socialist government of Fidel Castro, which tend to act in place of the police to quell any possible outbreak of “counterrevolutionary” activity.

The dissidents dropped flowers into the sea in memory of 40 people who died on Jul. 13, 1994 when the “13 de Marzo” tugboat sank. A group of Cubans had hijacked the vessel in the port in an attempt to make it to the United States without permission from Cuban migration authorities.

The old tugboat, with some 60 people on board, sank after it was rammed by one of the patrol boats that was chasing it down.

According to the government, the collision was an accident. Coast guard vessels helped rescue the survivors.

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International said 40 people, including women and children, drowned.

On Wednesday, the dissidents chanted anti-government slogans, but their protests were soon broken up by hundreds of “brigadistas” and local residents. Several demonstrators were injured and around 10 were arrested by the police.

The Cuban press, which is a state monopoly, ignored the incidents. But several international news agencies had been previously notified by the demonstrators of the time and place of the protests.

In previous years, dissidents and relatives of those who drowned have gathered in public without any incident.

Sánchez said that in the past few weeks, shows of popular discontent have appeared around the country, mainly at night, during the frequent power outages. “We’re talking about isolated, unconnected and spontaneous protests against the (economic) difficulties, which do not really have political aims,” he said.

The dissident said the manifestations of discontent have included anti-government signs put up in public places, the breaking of shop windows in state-owned businesses, and stones thrown against buses or police cars.

“There is a bit of social and political unrest, which was heightened by the impact of Hurricane Dennis’s passage through the island last week,” commented Sánchez, who said the evacuation of more than one million people overwhelmed the capacity of Cuba’s world-renowned disaster prevention system.

Almost the entire country was affected by the hurricane, which struck when Cuba’s 11.2 million people were already struggling with the lengthy power cuts that grew worse throughout May and June, as a result of scheduled maintenance work on several power plants and a series of breakdowns in others.

Since the most trying moments of the economic crisis in the 1990s, when blackouts could stretch out for more than 12 hours, the Cuban government has tried to avoid the explosive mix of scorching summer temperatures in July and August and interruptions in electric power service.

The irritation provoked by frequent power cuts lasting hours at a time has combined with the ongoing difficulties with transportation – another major problem with no solution in sight – and the rise in the cost of living, despite recent wage hikes.

The year 1994 was one of the most tense during the economic crisis sparked by the collapse of the eastern European socialist bloc and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which previously accounted for the vast majority of Cuba’s foreign trade.

Less than a month after the sinking of the “13 de Marzo” tugboat, Havana’s “malecón” or seawall was the stage for the unprecedented disturbances of Aug. 5, 1994.

Hundreds of people had begun to gather early in the morning along the seawall that runs along Havana’s northern coast. They were drawn by announcements made on anti-Castro radio stations based in the United States, which claimed that a flotilla of privately owned boats was preparing to set out from Miami and pick up anyone in Cuba who wanted to leave the country.

Radio Martí, a station financed by the U.S. government, retracted the announcement later in the morning, but hundreds had already gathered in the area where the boats were supposed to arrive. According to witnesses, it was here that the first anti-government protests erupted, with people in the crowd throwing rocks through the windows of state-owned shops.

Government supporters, led by construction workers from the Blas Roca contingent, descended on the scene and scuffled with the protesters. A number of people were wounded, but the police did not arrive on the scene until one o’clock in the afternoon.

But instead of fully withdrawing, the protesters regrouped and continued to demonstrate, leading to further violent confrontations, this time with the police.

President Fidel Castro arrived on the scene of the protests in the mid-afternoon and walked through the areas surrounded by hundreds of followers, who had come from all over the city to show their support. This sent the last of the demonstrators scurrying, although roughly 300 people were eventually arrested in connection with the Aug. 5, 1994 disturbances.

That night, Castro appeared on television and blamed the incident on the U.S. government’s policy of encouraging people to leave the country illegally. He warned that if this policy was not changed, Cuba would do nothing to stop people from leaving for the United States en masse, a situation that would benefit neither Havana nor Washington.