Castro's latest crackdown spits on pope's call for open Cuba

Published in The Orlando Sentinel on February 19, 1999.

Cuba is cracking down on prostitution. About time.

Until recently dictator Fidel Castro had refused to acknowledge that Cuban girls and women were selling themselves to Canadian, Italian, German, Spanish, Latin American and even illegal American tourists so that they could feed their families.

Cuba now is cracking down on drug dealers. About time.

One can only hope that Castro will hand himself the death penalty under that new law.

There's enough evidence accumulated by the United States and other foreign governments through the years that points to the Cuban communist government's own complicity in drug trafficking. More than one government report has suggested that Castro has allowed Colombian cartels to use the island as a shipping point in exchange for U.S. dollars to prop up his ailing regime.

And Cuba now is cracking down on Cuban journalists who are not sanctioned by the communist government. Castro has deemed that it's "counterrevolutionary" for a Cuban to report for any news organization or humanitarian group overseas about incidents and conditions in Cuba. They can prepare for 20 years in prison. About time.

Maybe now the foreign-government leaders and American business giants who have been growing ever sympathetic to Castro's megalomaniacal schemes will take their blinders off and see that regime for what it is: Stalin's brutality, Caribbean-style.

Let's stand back a minute, though.

Let's not be so quick to judge Castro's 40-year reign of terror.

Let's admit that Uncle Sam's trade embargo against Cuba has been a convenient whipping boy for Fidel, that he uses it to scare Cubans into believing that the United States, any day now, will invade, that this nation is bent on harming the Cuban people.

OK, so what other options does the U.S. government have?

Dropping the embargo unconditionally, unilaterally seems like the Christian thing to do -- certainly, Pope John Paul II has called for an end to the U.S. embargo, in an effort to help the people during bad economic times.

But every time I start to think the pope is right, every time my heart softens to that notion or when my practical side says the embargo really has failed, Castro pulls something that jerks me back to the reality that Cubans on the island face: ever-growing repression.

So do we now reward Castro's government by lifting the embargo just as he cracks down once again on average Cubans who just have a difference of opinion about their own country's government?

It's called the "Law for the Protection of Cuba's National Independence and Economy," but all the dictatorship is trying to do is quash any notion of free will, of God-given talents, of human rights.

It is Castro's way of spitting on the pope's call for Cuba to open itself up to the world.

Oh, Castro is aware that the new law could be a public-relations fiasco for him. Before the law was passed Tuesday, Cuba's parliament unanimously agreed to Castro's proposal to reduce from 30 to 20 years the time those convicted under the new law would spend in prison.

In Castro's "democratic" government, everything's "unanimous," you see.

Castro said his government must "eliminate whatever part of the [new law's] text that could be interpreted as saying that in Cuba someone could be sanctioned for the mere act of dissent," the Cuba news agency Prensa Latina stated.

What benevolence. That surely will keep the world's leaders blinded by Castro's feigned generosity of spirit and support for human rights.

[Posted 02/18/1999 10:45 PM EST]