From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE AMERICAS
Beware of Fidel's Mini-Me
Venezuelans have a chance to head off Cuban style repression in today's recall election.
If passions among Venezuela's opposition seem extreme in the run-up to today's recall referendum on President Hugo Chavez, it is not without good reason. From his presidential bully pulpit, Mr. Chavez virulently rails against the U.S. as an international menace, sympathizes with Middle Eastern militancy and, most frightening for Venezuelans, dreams of making his country into another Cuba.
The process of Cubanizing Venezuela is well underway. As noted here last week there is a lot of worry about the potential for government fraud in the recall vote. Those concerns have increased as Mr. Chavez has sharply limited the number of international election observers allowed in the county. He is also harassing Sumate, an important Venezuelan civic group, seeking to monitor the vote.
Of course, there will be other "observers." As Miami Herald columnist Andres Oppenheimer noted on last week: "Among the 98 personalities [Mr. Chavez] has invited to 'monitor' the election is Hebe de Bonafini, the leader of the ultra-leftist wing of Argentina's Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a self-proclaimed human rights activist who in 2001 publicly expressed her 'happiness' about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States."
Ms. de Bonafini, it is worth noting, is a strong supporter and close political ally of Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, who recently returned from hobnobbing with Mr. Chavez at a trade fair on Venezuela's Margarita Island and whose government has refused to condemn Cuba's human rights record at the U.N. Mr. Chavez seems to also inspire Bolivia's militant left and Colombia's Marxist guerrillas.
That the Venezuelan president, flush with oil income, aspires to be Fidel's mini-me on the South American continent is chilling. In an essay submitted for publication in Spain's ABC newspaper by Oswaldo Paya, the leader of the Varela Project--a grass-roots movement in Cuba calling for elections, free speech and private property--reminds us, with grisly detail, of what Venezuelans have to fear.
Mr. Paya writes of his fellow Cubans: "Jose Daniel Ferrer, Leonel Grave de Peralta, Normando Hernández Gonzalez and Diosdado Gonzalez Marrero, are all prisoners of conscience. The first three were very active in the Varela Project and today, August 8, they have spent seventy-three days in individual punishment cells."
These "punishment cells" are a step down from "normal cells," Mr. Paya explains. A normal cell is "1.8 by 3 meters with a door often sealed, lots of mosquitoes, sometimes rats, a bed made of cement, and at the same level, emerging from the wall, a plumbing outlet, barely a few centimeters from the latrine."
Imagine then, the punishment cell. "In order to do this, the reader should enter a closet with dimensions less than the "normal" cell, leaving only a crack to breathe through and listen to the threats and insults from your jailers. In just a few hours all the bones in your body will be aching. This takes place in Pinar del Río, Cuba, at Prisón del Kilometro Cinco y Medio, a prison sadly notorious for its cruelty."
But it is not only such confinement that Mr. Paya describes as disgracefully inhumane--it is also securing one's daily bread if you are an ordinary Cuban. "The police do not search for arms or explosives but rather for coffee, fish, cheese, rice; any product can be confiscated or stolen without any recourse, except a fine or a beating if the detained dares to demand the return of their confiscated items that in many cases wind up in the homes of the impounding police. . . .
"The situation of repression becomes even worse the greater the privileges of the hierarchy, who now are the new and only employers, the 'managers' of a country where they persecute an elderly widow for selling pastries. The expectations of the future about Cuban government policies are of 'squeezing harder.' Which in good Cuban lingo means more repression and more oppression."
There are eerie parallels--though clearly more extreme in Cuba--to the maltreatment of Venezuelans who signed the petition calling for this Sunday's recall vote. "Cuban State Security has presently unleashed throughout the entire country a repressive wave against the Varela Project," Mr. Paya writes. "It's agents are visiting one by one the 25,000 signers of the Varela Project, whose contact information they know since we turned in the petition with their information and signatures to the National Assembly of Popular Power. They are threatened. They try to force them to recant and some are fired from their jobs. State Security has distributed lists among the Committees in Defense of the Revolution (CDR) to keep them under surveillance and maintain a file on these citizens who while in the exercise of their constitutional right made this citizen's petition for a referendum."
Last week too, dissident Vladimiro Roca, the son of the late Cuban communist party hero Blas Roca, echoed Mr. Paya's indictment. In a message to the European Union, Mr. Roca warned that Castro is trying to give the impression of tolerance by letting some seriously ill prisoners go home. The goal, Mr. Roca says, is to get the EU to resume economic assistance to the island and to sharply limit dissident access to European embassies in Havana. Yet, as he points out, these gravely ill prisoners have not had their sentences commuted. They continue under house detention. All 75 prisoners arrested in the March 2003 crackdown against peaceful dissent remain prisoners. Mr. Roca begs the EU and other countries not to ignore the Vienna Convention and not "to permit the Cuban government to continue with the massive violation of the human rights of the Cuban population."
Over 300 Latin American congressmen and former heads of state signed a letter this month supporting the Cuban dissidents, condemning the repression and asking that their embassies in Havana be open to the oppressed. Such support, together with Europe's condemnation in recent years, suggests wide recognition and rejection of Castro's latest demonstration of brute power.
Yet totalitarian temptations remain alive and well in the region, as the parallels between Cuba and Venezuela attest. Mr. Paya and Mr. Roca are doing their best to warn their neighbors across the Caribbean Sea of what Venezuela could become if Chavez isn't stopped.
Ms. O'Grady is a senior editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal and editor of the "Americas," a weekly column that appears every Friday in the Journal and deals with politics, economics and business in Latin America and Canada.
