POLITICS-CUBA: Poland Rebuked for Backing Island’s Dissidents

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, May 16 2000 (IPS) - Poland is advising and supporting members of the illegal internal opposition in Cuba in hopes that the Fidel Castro regime will be toppled within five years, charged Cuba’s state-run press Tuesday.

An editorial titled “Counterrevolutionary Venture by the Polish Government in Cuba,” appearing on the front page of ‘Granma’ newspaper, voice of the governing Communist Party, charges the Polish representatives who visited the island May 2 to 10 were “conspirators.”

Senator Zbigniew Romaszewski, president of the Polish Senate’s Human Rights Commission, and fellow citizen Piotr Kielanows, toured Cuba under the pretext of formalising a joint scientific programme, according to the Cuban version of events.

But instead of contacting government officials regarding the project, the visitors followed a tight schedule of activities with members of the internal dissidence, says the newspaper article.

Héctor Palacios, one of the opposition members named in the ‘Granma’ editorial, told IPS they had met with the Polish representatives, but stressed that the editorial “is full of inaccuracies” and only proves that the Cuban government is incapable of “listening to anything that is not part of its own discourse.”

The government, meanwhile, stated that the “Polish advisers” had led a discussion on Romaszewski’s experiences as a member of the Solidarity union in Poland and the work of that organisation to “achieve the collapse of the socialist regime” there.

The senator allegedly told dissidents gathered at the residence of the Polish embassy’s political adviser that, “given the current international situation” and the expansion of the internal opposition, the Castro government “has a maximum of five more years left in power.”

This is allegedly why Castro has incited mass demonstrations to demand the repatriation of Cuban boy Elián González, 6, who has been in the United States – at the centre of a bitter custody battle – since he was rescued at sea last November 25.

A ccording to the editorial, Romaszewski said this instigation is “dangerous” because it could lead to “the people turning (…) against” Castro or, “on the contrary, violently attacking the opposition.”

The Polish senator reportedly said the island is going through “a process similar to that of the former socialist countries of Europe” and that the “Cuban system amounts to a dictatorship” that necessarily tends “toward corruption,” as occurred in Poland.

He advised the dissidents to “prepare themselves to take on the important responsibility of governing the country,” according to ‘Granma.’

But Palacios, director of the banned Social Studies Centre, maintained that far from equating the situations of the two countries, the meeting’s participants had agreed that the Castro government must promote internal changes on the island.

What the ‘Granma’ editorial is trying to do, commented the dissident, is “misrepresent those people who, from the inside, from very civic points of view, try to provide the changes the island needs,” changes that will eventually occur “whether the government wants them or not.”

The story began Monday when the authorities warned several people against taking part in the “Culture and Globalisation” debate organised by the Social Studies Centre, said Palacios.

He added that the release from prison over the last week of opposition activists Felix Bonne and Marta Beatriz Roque, members of the Internal Dissidence Working Group, does not mean the Cuban government is becoming more flexible.

In March 1999, Bonne and Roque were sentenced, along with Vladimiro Roca and René Gómez Manzana, to prison for three to five years for “sedition.” Known as the Group of Four, they were arrested for distributing a document critical of the governing Communist Party.

In Cuba “there are more than 300 political prisoners who deserve the same treatment. (The government) releases some and represses others,” Palacios said.

Cuba’s allegations against Poland harkens back to a similar episode in April when the island accused the Czech Republic of being a “puppet” of the United States because it had pushed a resolution through the United Nations Commission Human Rights condemning Cuba’s humanitarian record.

The Cuban government organised a massive protest outside the Czech diplomatic headquarters in Havana and made public a detailed report on the alleged subversive acts of several Czech diplomats on the island.

Though it was a supporter of the Czech resolution approved by the UN last April 18, Poland had escaped a tongue-lashing from Havana because, according to ‘Granma,’ “the worst record belonged to the Czech officials.”

“The old foxes at Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Relations thought they were too smart or too important to be criticised. Perhaps they even thought they had been granted amnesty,” mocked the ‘Granma’ editorial.

The Polish visitors and diplomats on the island, along with a group of Cuban dissidents, apparently held an economists’ conference May 5 through May 7.

The meeting was organised in Pinar del Río, 176 km west of Havana, by the Civic-Religious Training Centre and its founder, lay Catholic leader Dagoverto Valdés Hernández.

‘Granma’ calls Valdés “a systematic slanderer and outright enemy of the revolutionary process,” and says he is hiding his actions behind the “facilities” the Castro government “provides for the religious activities of the Catholic Church.”

The Polish visitors attended the opening of an exhibit at a church of paintings and posters about prisoners of conscience around the world, a show promoted by the Polish embassy.

They also went to a concert with the spouse of Oscar Elías Biscet, a dissident who is in prison for taking part last year in a hunger strike that authorities said was an illegal public protest.

The editorial claims that Romaszewski handed Biscet’s wife an envelope of money and arranged for her to maintain regular contact with the Polish embassy.