ACHTUNG LANG UND UNDEUTSCH

Sunday Times, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,...8936_1,00.html

Ailing and isolated

Christine Toomey reports
Castro cracks down as Cuba cries freedom

They once had a dream of an equal society, free education and health
care in exchange for loyalty to the state. Now, 46 years on, Cuba's
communist regime lies in tatters amid increasing poverty and corruption. One
day Castro will be gone - but the future could be even more frightening

Jostled in the back of an antiquated car on a tortuous ride through
the Cuban countryside to avoid police checkpoints, Laura Pollan recalls the
words of a song. Tapping her fingers on the worn leather seat, she begins to
sing in a low voice: "We are the vanguard of the revolution, our books held
high, bringing all Cuba literacy! Through valleys and mountains we carry the
means to give light to truth!"

Translated roughly from Spanish, the words to this "Hymn to Literacy"
lose much of their verve. But as she sings, Pollan, 56, flourishes her hands
and smiles. She remains animated as she recalls how, as a 12-year-old girl,
she had volunteered to join the ranks of nearly a million Cuban
schoolchildren sent out into the countryside in the spring of 1961 to live
with illiterate peasant families and teach them how to read and write.

The year before, Fidel Castro had vowed to the United Nations that one
of the first aims of the Cuban revolution would be to make sure that every
Cuban - an estimated 40% of whom were illiterate - could read and write
within a year. It was something never before believed achievable in the
developing world.

But less than 12 months later, tens of thousands of teenagers were
marching through the streets of Havana carrying giant mock pencils to
celebrate the accomplishment of this goal.

It was an achievement that caught the world's imagination and helped
define the romantic image of the revolution that had ousted the country's
military ruler, Fulgencio Batista, a dictator so brutal that he resorted,
among other atrocities, to the public castration of opponents.

Pollan remembers her uniform, the lamp she carried for night-time
study, thousands of which were donated by China's communist regime, and the
reading glasses the brigadistas were given to distribute to those who needed
them - a donation by another communist ally, Bulgaria.

"I have great memories of that time," says Pollan, who went on to
become a teacher. "There was so much enthusiasm. The revolution was still
young. It had not yet shown its true face."

We are travelling to Havana from the central province of Villa Clara,
where Pollan had been trying to visit her husband in prison. She had been
refused. It was Christmas Eve and she was allowed to leave him a bag of
apples and a letter. But prisoners such as her husband are permitted
visitors only once every three months, if that.

To the Cuban government, her husband, Hector Maseda, is an enemy of
the state. His crimes include founding Cuba's opposition Liberal party - all
opposition parties are banned - and writing articles about the explosion of
sex tourism in Cuba and the history of the country's opposition movement.
These were published in magazines and websites in Europe and the US; all
Cuban media is state-controlled, freedom of expression being an alien
concept.

As the world's attention was focused on the imminent invasion of Iraq
in mid-March 2003, Maseda was among 75 government critics - mostly
journalists, poets, independent librarians and political activists -
arrested by the Cuban authorities, subjected to summary trials and sentenced
to lengthy prison terms. In Maseda's case, that was 20 years on charges
amounting to sedition. It was the most severe crackdown on Cuba's dissident
movement since Castro led his guerrilla forces to victory in 1959.

Pollan stood by helpless that night as her husband was bundled out of
their modest home in central Havana. Together with his typewriter and a fax
machine, books were also confiscated. Among them were the works of Vaclav
Havel, the playwright and former Czech president who led his country's
opposition movement until the fall of its communist regime. As he was led
away, Maseda took his wife's hand and told her: "Laura, do not feel ashamed.
I am not a murderer or a thief. I have done nothing but defend my ideas."

The rot of the Cuban revolution lies in the contrast between these two
very different scenes painted by Pollan. The first: her recollection of a
time of optimism, altruism and cataclysmic social change. The second: an act
rooted in paranoia, stifling control and absolute determination by Castro to
hold onto power at any cost.

For 46 years after Fidel Castro, the world's longest-ruling leader,
stood before the United Nations promising to transform his country into a
tropical utopia, this island nation of 11m has been driven to exhaustion,
and millions of them to despair, by the implacable will of its "maximum
leader". Even now, after the vow by the revolution's ideologue Ernesto "Che"
Guevara that future generations of Cubans would be "more perfect",
schoolchildren start their day with a salute and the solemn vow "Seremos
como Che!" - "We will be like Che!" But what, really, has become of this
generation of Che's children and grandchildren? (Had he lived, he would now
be 76.) And what is likely to become of them when his former
comrade-in-arms, 77-year-old Castro, no longer holds Cuba's reins of power?

For more than 40 years, all administrations in the US, which once
occupied Cuba militarily and then dominated it as a debauched mafia
playground, have tried to topple Castro. First through the bungled
CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, then in a series of bizarre
assassination plots, including one to plant toxic powder in Castro's
clothing. Throughout, the US has held the island in the stranglehold of an
economic embargo. Despite all this, Castro has seen off nine American
presidents and is determined to increase that count.

Yet in George W Bush he appears to see a more formidable foe. One
reason for the roundup of political opponents such as Maseda is believed to
have been speculation that countries other than Iraq accused by the state
department of being "state sponsors of terrorism" could become US military
targets. The threat of US invasion was portrayed as so great by the Castro
regime that three weeks before Christmas, more than 1m Cuban soldiers,
reservists and support teams were mobilised in a military exercise dubbed
Bastion 2004. So extensive was the coverage of the simulated invasion on all
state TV channels, and so pervasive the sound of military alarm sirens, that
some older Cubans thought they were genuinely under attack.

For most Cubans, however, there is only one way that Castro will ever
relinquish his hold on power. This is by means of what they refer to
obliquely as "biology" - his death. Ever astute about his own image, the
maximum leader makes light of his age, and jokes about his immortality
regularly make the rounds. Like the one about the baby turtle expected to
live to 100 years, which he refused as a pet on the grounds that it would
"make me sad when it passed away".

But a brief glimpse of what is likely to happen if, as seems almost
certain, Castro dies while still in power came just six months ago, when he
stumbled and fell after delivering a speech in the capital of Villa Clara
province, Santa Clara.

Santa Clara is the holy grail of idealistic fervour for many foreign
tourists piling into this dusty provincial town. It is here that Che
Guevara's remains were brought from Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967
after attempting to foment revolution in the rest of Latin America and
Africa. His vast, white marble mausoleum lies on the edge of town, and it
was here that Castro tripped and fell last October. The fall was the latest
in a series of health scares. Although he is still capable of delivering
interminable speeches, his voice has become increasingly tremulous in recent
years and his hands sometimes shake, leading to speculation that he is
suffering from the early stages of Parkinson's disease. Several years ago he
collapsed owing to heat exhaustion during a speech. When he finished his
speech in a TV studio later that evening, he joked that he'd been
"pretending to be dead to see what my burial would look like".

But while film footage of the aftermath of his most recent fall last
October was broadcast around the world, Cubans say the moment their leader
began to stumble to the ground, the image on the country's state-run
television station became blurry. It was then quickly replaced by cartoons
of Popeye and Bugs Bunny.

What his countrymen did not apparently see was Castro being helped
into a chair as doctors danced attendance (he had fractured bones in an arm
and a leg), nor the rehearsed response of Communist-party functionaries who
were present raising their fists and chanting "Viva Raul!" as Castro's
brother and heir apparent, Raul Castro, was hailed. Had the fall proven
fatal, he would have been anointed immediately.

Less than a mile from the mausoleum, Guillermo Farinas eases his
wheelchair into the small, enclosed porch of his mother's home and hands
over a photograph of himself taken shortly after his most recent release
from jail. In it he is emaciated. The scars where tubes were inserted into
his stomach for force-feeding are still raw. Farinas, 42, has staged
numerous hunger strikes over the past six years during prison terms meted
out for opposing the government. He repeatedly yanked feeding tubes out of
his stomach, vowing he'd die for his ideals. He was eventually released from
jail and placed under a form of house arrest. But malnutrition has left him
so weakened, he is not yet able to walk.

Farinas - like Pollan and all others identified here - realises
speaking out could bring further reprisals. But all are determined that the
reality behind the image carefully crafted for tourist consumption of Cuba
as a sultry Caribbean isle offering sun, salsa, cigars - and, though the
state denies it, cheap sex - should be widely known.

"Nobody here discounts the possibility that Castro, or Bush, could
provoke hostilities between Cuba and the US," says Farinas. "And in many
ways this would suit Castro: if he dies fighting, he remains a myth. But the
real danger is the apocalyptic language this regime has used for so long,
planting the idea of violence in people's minds for after he dies."

Aside from street placards proclaiming "Socialism or death!", Castro's
communist regime has fostered deep hatred and resentment, not least that
orchestrated by the state against, and felt by, the more than 2m Cubans now
living in exile. The idea that there will be a big welcome to a returning
flood of exiles when Castro goes is scoffed at by most Cubans. While many
older ones who remember the brutal Batista regime revere Castro - though 70%
of the population was born after the revolution - most are genuinely afraid
of what will come after his demise. With good reason.

Some predict if the baton is passed, as planned, from Castro to his
73-year-old brother, an even more authoritarian regime could be imposed. As
head of the armed forces, which now enjoy great privilege as they control
the most profitable two-thirds of the country's struggling economy, the
vested interest of Raul and his military cohorts in maintaining the status
quo would be intense. Yet little of the legitimacy Fidel Castro has as the
revolution's figurehead is expected to pass to his brother. The hunched,
elfin-like Raul, whose drinking is said to have left him with serious liver
problems, is widely disliked - particularly among the young, who see him as
a grey apparatchik.

But if Raul Castro fails to stamp his authority quickly, or dies
before his brother or shortly afterwards, infighting among the
Communist-party elite could lead the armed forces to step in and form the
sort of military government led by General Jaruzelski in Poland in the
1980s. Says one European who is based in Havana: "The perception in Europe
that there will be the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall here is not
how the situation is viewed by Cubans. For some, Cuba's civil war is ongoing
and they don't rule out a second round of hostilities."

Anachronistic as it seems, no visitor to Cuba can fail to sense that
this is an island stuck in a past era. The many lumbering 1950s American
Chevrolets and puttering Soviet Ladas still on the roads are one trivial
sign. More potent is the sight of dozens of workers standing to attention
along Havana's vast curved corniche, the Malecon, swearing allegiance to the
revolution and holding aloft documents marking them out as especially
fervent party loyalists.

But the fundamental difference between Cuba and former eastern-bloc
countries such as Poland, which threw off communism's shackles 15 years ago,
is not only that Cuba's revolution was home-grown, but that it has virtually
no civil society. Internal opposition, in contrast to the often-bellicose
exile community, is both painfully weak and disorganised. To follow
Farinas's story and those of other government opponents is to understand not
only why, but also how, this makes an eastern-European-style "velvet
revolution" post-Castro highly unlikely.

Like many of those interviewed, Farinas was initially the epitome of
Che Guevara's "new man". Raised in a revolutionary household - his father
fought Batista's forces and then served in the Belgian Congo with Guevara -
he spent his youth training as a military cadet before going to Africa in
1981 to help defend Angola's Marxist regime. There he won two
distinguished-service medals and was sent on to the Soviet Union for further
military training. After returning to Cuba he was discharged on medical
grounds. "I believed in the revolution until my ideals were crushed blow by
blow," says Farinas.

One of the first blows was the 1980 Mariel boat lift, during which
125,000 Cubans left for Miami after Castro announced Cuba would be well rid
of all those who wanted to leave. Party members were ordered to stone the
houses of those leaving and denounce them as gusanos, or worms. When Hector
Maseda, who was an engineer in a prestigious scientific-research facility,
argued that he had better things to do, he was expelled from the party and
lost his job.

The corruption Farinas says he witnessed, both while in the Soviet
Union and when he started work in a Havana hospital on his return, further
eroded his faith in the system. After witnessing a senior party official
pilfering sheets and powdered milk donated for sick children, Farinas was
sent to prison for making false accusations. He had already been kicked out
of the party for speaking out publicly about an act that also appalled many
of his countrymen: the 1989 execution of Arnaldo Ochoa, a popular general
convicted of drug smuggling, and three other senior army officers.

It is said to have been Raul Castro, who has held the post of defence
minister longer than any counterpart in history, who orchestrated the
executions of four of his own senior officers because of Ochoa's political
ambitions as a rival to his brother. The act reinforced Raul's reputation as
a hardliner and consolidated his own power. He is also the second secretary
of the Communist party and effectively controls the interior ministry and
all state-run media.

Increasingly disillusioned, Farinas started meeting other government
opponents. But each group he associated with was broken by a wave of
arrests. Most recently, this included a network of small independent lending
libraries set up after Castro pronounced there were no prohibited books in
Cuba - even though works by most Cuban exiles, Camus, Solzhenitsyn, George
Orwell and many others are banned. Some of those who ran such libraries were
among the 75 arrested in the most recent crackdown. Farinas slips out of his
wheelchair and drags himself upstairs on his hands and knees, to show what
remains of his own small library after a similar raid; the tatty collection
of Spanish cultural magazines and scientific journals do not look like a
threat to state security.

Then he and others started collecting signatures in support of a
referendum on changes to Cuba's communist system. The Varela Project has
been trying to exploit a clause in the Cuban constitution that allows for
discussion of new laws if at least 10,000 citizens request it. So far, more
than 25,000 signatures in support of the project have been collected and
presented to parliament. But the request has been ignored. Dozens of the
project's organisers were among those arrested in March 2003; many were
convicted on the testimony of state security agents who infiltrated the
dissident movement.

This is the history of political opposition in Cuba: groups are
formed, infiltrated, members arrested and accused of conspiring with the US
to bring down the government, which is enough to ensure the group is
discredited to many Cubans. The level of infiltration makes even those
within the groups mistrustful of each other.

In recent months, a dozen of the 75 arrested, whose health was
failing, have been released - partly in response, it is believed, to
overtures by the left-wing Spanish government. The EU has traditionally
believed more was to be gained from a more moderate policy towards Cuba than
the zealousness of the US, which Castro turns to his own advantage by
painting himself as a plucky David to America's Goliath. Following the
arrest of the 75 dissidents, however, relations with most EU countries,
including the UK, sank so low that all diplomatic ties were severed and are
only now being slowly repaired.

Among those released was Marta Beatriz Roque, a long-term opposition
figure who is calling for all of the island's diverse dissident groups to
attend a "grand assembly" in Havana in May. Few believe this will be allowed
to go ahead. Another of those released was Manuel Vasquez, a journalist,
prizewinning poet and former editor of a Communist-party youth magazine, who
believes that another reason Cuba's opposition is so fragmented is that
"everyone wants to be a leader, not a soldier". "There is no democratic
tradition here," says Vasquez, who was held in solitary confinement for 14
months and was only released because he was found to have a potentially
fatal pulmonary embolism. "People here just don't know how to defend their
rights. This dictatorship is based on control of all means of communication.

"People, especially those in Europe with a more romantic idea of Cuba,
need to realise we are in danger of passing from a communist to a military
dictatorship," says Vasquez, 53, sitting outside his dingy high-rise flat.
Several days later, I learn the government has issued him an exit permit to
leave Cuba. He looks certain to use it. But this also underlines another
problem.

Half an hour's drive north of Santa Clara is the downtrodden town of
Placetas. The sign on the door of Berta Antunez's wooden shack marks her out
as a government opponent: a crude black-and-white painting of a prisoner
behind bars. Antunez's brother Jorge Luis Garcia has been in jail for the
past 14 years for, initially, criticising Cuban foreign policy. Scribbled
notes to his sister smuggled out of prison and since published abroad have
highlighted the appalling conditions and brutality to which prisoners of
conscience are regularly subjected in Cuba.

Antunez sums up one of the main problems she sees facing Cuba as
"geographical fatalism". She says: "We are so close to freedom across the
Florida Straits, many people would rather leave the island than stay and
fight for a better future here. If all those who put their energy into
constructing small rafts to escape put it into trying to change things here,
we might have had a change of government long ago."

Turning a blind eye to the waves of balseros, or boat people, who risk
death by attempting to flee the island in flimsy craft, has been used as a
safety valve to avoid explosions of social unrest. During the most recent
mass exodus, in 1994, when economic hardship was at its worst following the
collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 30,000 tried to reach Florida on
hastily constructed rafts. After the majority were intercepted by US
coastguards and returned to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay while the
political implications of their admission to the US were debated, they were
finally allowed to emigrate.

Rather than a flood of exiles wanting to return to Cuba once Castro
goes, it is this prospect of an even greater exodus of those wanting to
leave the island that has the US worried. If a successor regime allows
would-be emigrants to cross
the Florida Straits unchecked, it could well be the US military that
steps in to stop the flow.

The official mantra of the Cuban government is that life may be
tough - owing principally, they argue, to the US embargo - but most people
are content. Crime is low (police are everywhere); there are few beggars
(ditto); nobody is starving (a UN report claims 17% of the population was
undernourished by the end of the 1990s); and education and health care are
good and free. There is little evidence of such contentment on the streets.
Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance
of the island's indulgent sponsors in the Kremlin, Cuba's economy is still
in crisis. It has improved in recent years owing to trade deals with China,
Venezuela and a growing number of European companies. But basic goods are
still rationed. A family ration book allows one tube of toothpaste every
three months, a bar of soap every two months, 5lb of rice, 2lb of beans,
1/2lb of coffee per person and six eggs - on an average monthly wage of less
than £10. As a result, a black market flourishes and nearly everyone is
forced to find unorthodox and illegal ways of surviving.

Unlike the gerontocracies that prevailed behind the Iron Curtain,
however, Castro has recruited highly educated young economists into the
ruling elite. Some believe they offer the best hope Cuba has of a peaceful
transition to democracy. Others fear that a power struggle - between
moderates who support more market-oriented reforms and hardliners who fear
that too swift an opening up of the economy could lead to a Tiananmen
Square-style revolt - will play into the hands of the military; Cuba has
little record of compromise.

After a brief flirtation with market reforms led by moderates in the
1990s, the hardliners now hold sway. What limited private enterprise had
been allowed has been severely curtailed. Cuba's main industry is tourism,
but the face of its tourist industry - like that of its leadership - is
almost exclusively white. Apart from free health care and universal
education, the elimination of racial discrimination has been trumpeted as
one of the greatest achievements of the revolution. Yet there are many who
view racial divisions on the island as a time bomb.

More than half of Cuba's population is black or mulatto. They live in
the island's most dilapidated areas, make up a disproportionate share of the
prison population and complain of constant police harassment. They are
excluded from the "convertible peso" - the tourist currency - as most
tourist-sector employees are white, and so they are invariably poorer.
Simmering racial tension exploded briefly and was brutally repressed in
April 2003, when the government decided to make an example of young blacks
who attempted to hijack a ferry and force it to change course for the US.
Three were executed. When riots broke out on the Malecon in Havana in
protest, the demonstrators were dispersed by club-wielding security forces.

To keep a lid on such discontent, the authorities have swelled the
neighbourhood spy system - the committees for the defence of the revolution
(CDRs) . There are an estimated 15,000 watch posts in Havana alone. Parents
also say that their children are being indoctrinated with ever more vehement
"anti-imperialist" views. One display was of primary-school children
laughing and whistling to each other as their teachers encouraged them to
sit scrawling anti-American graffiti and swastikas on the pavement with
chalk in front of the US-interests section on the Malecon. Behind the
children were giant billboards carrying pictures of Iraqi prisoners being
tortured by US soldiers in Iraq. The sign read "Fascists - Made in the USA".

The billboards were erected in response to Christmas decorations put
up by the US-interest section containing a large illuminated "75" in protest
at the jailed political prisoners.

Far from such playground politics, in Havana's gritty neighbourhood of
Alamar, Cuban youths start talking openly about what they really want.

"I want to be able to afford to buy a drink and take a girl dancing in
a club, and I can't," says one 17-year-old. "I want a pair of Nikes or
Reeboks," says another. "I want to be able to walk into a tourist hotel and
not be stopped like I am a criminal," says a third. "Here, tourists have
more privileges than we do in our own country. It stinks." "Here they'll
arrest you for nothing. We are not free to say what we want. I just want
out," says one 22-year-old, who has already tried to flee Cuba on a flimsy
raft and says he will try again. None of them wishes to be identified.

"The climate of fear this regime plays on has been very effective. We
are frozen in time. At the moment, there is no sign of a thaw," said one
prominent academic, who also wants to remain anonymous. "There is a great
emptiness and disorientation in this society. People are searching for
alternatives. But the government does not give alternatives any space to
grow."

Some turn to religion, to the growing number of evangelical sects, to
Santeria - an Afro-Cuban form of voodoo - or to traditional Catholicism.
Outsiders point to the Catholic Church as a potential force for change in
Cuba, but within the country itself there is less optimism.

Father Jose Felix Perez, of Santa Rita Church in Havana's Miramar
district, says despite hopes that the Catholic Church would be given more
space in society following the Pope's visit to Cuba in 1998, "nothing has
changed fundamentally. We are still not recognised as an interlocutor with
the government. People here are spiritually exhausted. We all need to be
able to look to the future, but people see a future with little hope".

Every Sunday morning, a group of women dressed in white gathers for
morning mass at the church of Santa Rita, among them Laura Pollan. All have
husbands, fathers or sons among the 75 dissidents still in jail. They come
to his church, Father Jose Felix says, because Santa Rita is the patron
saint of difficult causes. But the church is also close to the embassy
district of Havana and the women, calling themselves the damas en blanco
(the women in white), hope such a high-profile location will draw attention
to their campaign to have the political prisoners released.

After mass, these women walk silently up and down outside the church
with pictures of their loved ones pinned to their clothes. They then stand
before the church and say the Lord's Prayer in unison. After praying, the
women raise their hands and call loudly for what all but those who rule Cuba
now desire: "Libertad!" - "Freedom!"

Passers-by pay them little attention. "Those who know what they are
doing are afraid to show them any sign of support," the priest says. "The
problem for dissidents is one of solitude."

"We will never give up our protest," declares Pollan. "The authorities
have three options - free our husbands, imprison us or kill us." Sadly,
there is a fourth: the women are ignored - not only by their countrymen but
by the world.