By Brian Carnell

Sunday, September 7, 2003

The Cuban government recently engaged in a rather transparent attempt to convince Cuba's dissident movement that one of its best know dissidents was in fact a spy for the Communist regime.

In April, Cuba quickly rounded up 75 dissidents and tried them on various charges related to their opposition to Fidel Castro's regime. The dissidents received prison terms anywhere from 6 to 28 years.

At the same time, it as revealed that the Communist regime had managed to infiltrate the dissident movement with several spies. One of the most successful of these was Aleida de las Merces Godinez.

Godinez worked undercover for the Cuban government beginning sometime in 1994 and quickly gained the trust of other dissidents. Godinez testified at the one-day trial of Marta Beatriz Roque (along with low infant mortality, Cuba's communist government has apparently discovered efficiencies in legal proceedings unknown to capitalist nations). Roque received a 20-year prison term.

One dissident who remains free, however, is Elizardo Sanchez. Sanchez has been a public dissident of the regime for almost four decades and in 1998 won the Sakharov Prize for his work agitating for democracy in Cuba. His anti-Castro activities led to Sanchez spending almost 9 years in prison during the 1980s.

In August, the Cuban government claimed that Sanchez had actually been a government spy since sometime in the 1990s. The book includes photographs including one showing Sanchez meeting with an Interior Minister official and another showing him supposedly meeting in a park with a Cuban intelligence officers.

This is almost certainly a disinformation campaign by Cuba's government and few in the Cuban dissident community seem to be buying it.

But why try to smear Sanchez rather than sending him to jail like the other dissidents? Probably because foreign diplomats in Cuba apparently rely on Sanchez for information regarding the human rights situation in Cuba. Sanchez provides them with information about the number and condition of dissidents held by the state. The government is likely trying to cast a shadow over that information -- if Sanchez is a spy, after all, could his reports on dissidents be trusted?

Reuters, however, quoted an unnamed European diplomat as saying that the charges didn't really matter, "Whether he is a state security agent or not, the figures are accurate and very useful, and we will continue using them."

Finally, it's interesting to consider Left wing reaction to the crackdown. Castro's no idiot -- he timed the crackdown at a time when the world was focused on the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Now before the war, a group of Left wing academics circulated a letter suggesting that Israel might use the world's distraction with Iraq to try to expel the Palestinians. This, of course, did not happen. Neither did many Leftists seem overly concerned by Cuba's timing of its crackdown.

In fact, The Nation's commentary on the Cuba crackdown did an excellent job of recycling the same old script -- when a Communist country jails activists with one day trials, you see, it's all the United States' fault,

Why then this sudden reversal? Why the crackdown? In part, it was in reaction to growing provocations on the part of the Bush Administration, which had ordered the new chief of the US Interests Section, James Cason, to hold a series of high-profile meetings with dissidents, even including seminars in his own residence in Havana. Given that Cason's announced purpose was to promote "transition to a participatory form of government," the Cubans came to see the meetings as subversive in nature and as highly provocative. And, in fairness, let us imagine the reaction of the Attorney General and the Director of Homeland Security if the chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington was holding meetings with disgruntled Americans and announcing that the purpose was to bring about a new form of government--a socialist government--in the United States. He would have been asked to leave the country faster than Tom Ridge could say "duct tape."

Ah, nobody rationalizes away the behavior of Communist dictators like The Nation.

Sources:

Cuba Rights Activist Weathers Castro Spy Charges. Isabel Garcia-Zarza, Reuters, August 29, 2003.

Cuba dissident accused of spying. Stephen Gibbs, BBC, August 19, 2003.

Castro dissident labelled a spy. David Rennie, Daily Telegraph (London), Augsut 20, 2003.

Cuban spy taunts opposition. Associated Press, April 22, 2003.

800 American professors sign document warning of coming Israeli ethnic cleansing. Nigel Parry, The Electronic Intifada, 18 December 2002.

Crackdown in Cuba. Wayne S. Smith, The Nation, April 24, 2003.

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