Word: cuban
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Late last month, a Cuban legislative panel officially jettisoned the Varela Project, an initiative spearheaded by dissidents seeking a referendum on political and economic reform within the island’s Communist framework. A clause in the regime’s constitution purportedly allows citizens to organize a national referendum if they can gather 10,000 signatures, and Cuba’s opposition leaders had been able to collect over 11,000 for the Varela petition, which they presented to the National Assembly in May 2002. Unfortunately, the dissident project now appears to have suffered the same fate...
...Castro’s prison-state. Many activists still cling to the myth of Cuba as a “workers’ paradise,” and thus cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the realities of state-sponsored murder, torture and persecution that have typified life for Cuban dissidents since the revolution in 1959. An unfortunately large group of Western liberals, moreover, seem captivated by stories of literacy programs and socialized medicine. Consequently, they choose to overlook or excuse Castro’s monumental human rights abuses...
...Thirteen Days” with the despot was “the experience of a lifetime,” while Spielberg called his November 2002 dinner with Castro “the eight most important hours of my life.” To these Hollywood icons, the Cuban leader is a veritable rock star...
...mildest of rebukes from the international community. Perhaps someday when Castro is gone and Cuba’s Communist archives are made available to the public, his sympathizers in the West will at last recognize the abject folly of their delusion. For the time being, however, proponents of Cuban freedom must not simply accept Castro’s tyranny as a normal state of affairs that cannot be changed—even though resigned complacency is the attitude that far too many Americans currently have toward Cuba...
...that end, if the Bush administration is serious about affecting real reforms on the island, it should highlight the imprisonment of noted Cuban dissidents the way Western activists did Nelson Mandela’s Apartheid-era jailing in South Africa. One name to start with—a name that a majority of Americans, and many Cubans, for that matter, are probably unaware of—is Francisco Chaviano Gonzalez. He has endured almost nine years of torture in the Combinado del Este prison for publicly attacking Castro on Cuban human rights violations. But Chaviano is only one of some...