Still the "Ashes of theOld": Human and Labor Rights in Castro's Cuba

...Jan Mosinki of Solidarity and I teamed up with translators and traveled separately to our destination...

...In a declaration that made headlines, Fidel told Goldberg that "the Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore...

...New Castro, Same Cuba documented more than forty recent cases of Cubans imprisoned under Raul Castro for violations of a single law prohibiting a "state of dangerousness," purportedly defined by anti-social activities...

...We did our best to avoid the scrutiny of Cuba's political police, including the marked police car conspicuously parked on the narrow street that provided the main approach to our meeting place...

...The Colegio had invited the Polish union Solidarity and my national union, the American Federation of Teachers, to send representatives to its conference...

...Still the 'Ashes of the Old Human and Labor Rights in Castro's Cuba POLITICS ABROAD LEO CASEY In recent months, a number of official announcements from inside Cuba have led to speculation that meaningful political change could be underway...

...State security was insistent that he would have to leave in their custody...

...I spoke of my union's core belief in solidarity—an injury to one is an injury to all—and of our commitment to a fraternity of working people and teachers that does not end at our national borders...

...The Castro regime has carefully studied developments in countries under communist rule and was an outspoken critic of the Gorbachev-era changes in the former Soviet Union, with their combination of political democratization and market reforms...

...They had all been fired from their teaching positions for their union work and were in various states of severe economic distress—a number of them told us that they possessed not much more than the clothes they wore and didn't know where their next meal was coming from...

...But Fidel quickly drew back from the implications of this statement: just a few days after Goldberg published his "Cuban model" comments on a blog, Fidel told a University of Havana audience that he really meant to affirm Communist orthodoxy on the failures of capitalism...

...One man was blind in one eye, the result of a brutal beating by the Cuban political police...

...Today, almost all political dissent in Cuba is criminalized through a series of repressive laws...

...After what seemed forever but was fifteen minutes of argument, state security left empty-handed...

...Serpa later published a number of accounts of the Colegio conference on the dissident news blog Miscelaneas de Cuba...

...Unemployment is sufficient grounds to be found in a "state of dangerousness" by the Castro regime—a remarkably Orwellian form of double jeopardy, given that firings and blacklisting are commonly used against dissenters...

...Most of the Cuban educator unionists left, but a smaller group—a mixture of older and younger teachers, men and women, predominantly Latino but with a few Afro-Cubans—stayed behind to meet with us the next day...

...It is they who deserve our support, as they bravely struggle for a new democratic Cuba that respects the rights of all...

...You will take no one away," she emphatically told state security that day...

...The expression of views "contrary to the decision of the Cuban people to build socialism and communism" is forbidden by the Cuban Constitution, leading to prosecutions on charges of enemy propaganda, contempt of authority, rebellion, acts against state security, clandestine printing, and distribution of false news...

...A leader in her own right of a group of mothers and wives of Cuban political prisoners, the Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White), she had helped organize weekly protests for the liberation of their loved ones ever since the 2003 mass arrests that had taken her husband...

...In a widely reported, staged interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, Castro condemned the anti-Semitism of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...

...The emergence of a Cuban market authoritarianism could well be a welcome development for the corporate world, which has certainly profited mightily from the Chinese version of that model...

...Within weeks of our meeting, Rivas would be hospitalized when Castro's agents attacked her and others of the Damas de Blanco as they marched peacefully on the eve of the International Day of Human Rights...

...Close to eighty members of the Colegio from across Cuba had come together, only to have state security descend upon the gathering, declare it "counter-revolutionary," and threaten to arrest them if they persisted in meeting...

...Suddenly a commotion broke out at the entrance to the apartment...

...One teacher had a daughter with her, as she had not been able to find child care, and there was a hasty rush to find a hiding place for the young girl...

...Gathered in the middle of the room were a dozen Cuban educators—remnants of a national conference of the independent teachers union, the Colegio de Pedagogos Independientes, which had planned to meet that month...

...Continued authoritarian rule, with the prohibition of independent unions democratically accountable to workers, would enable the Castro regime to keep the wages of the Cuban work force artificially low in order to attract foreign investment, much as authoritarian rule has done in China...

...Arrested Cuban dissidents are regularly denied even a semblance of due process of law, and the conditions of political prisoners can only be described as cruel and inhumane: overcrowded, unhygienic, and unhealthy, leading to extensive malnutrition and illness...

...The room had once been part of a more spacious apartment, with high ceilings designed to provide a measure of relief from the heat of the day, but the couple who made this place their home had built in it a sleeping loft for the many civil society activists who gathered there from across Cuba, and there was barely enough space to stand up...

...Nearly half of an August 2010 issue of the official Cuban newspaper Granma was devoted to Fidel Castro's fawning exegesis of a book propounding a conspiracy theory of secret world government, Daniel Estulin's The Secrets of the Bilder-berg Club, which is now current on the far right and among the followers of Lyndon LaRouche...

...De Miranda himself had been released from prison only because his health was so precarious that the regime feared he might die there—an event that would have imposed a heavy political price, given his international reputation as a human rights advocate and labor leader...

...As each of the remaining teachers told his or her story, it was evident that they had very little left to lose...

...De Miranda and his wife, Soledad Rivas Verdeda, faced down the police...

...In the middle of the circle was Roberto de Miranda Hernandez, leader of the Colegio and one of the scores of leading Cuban human rights advocates and trade unionists who had been imprisoned by the Castro regime in a wave of repression during the spring of 2003...

...Once they were gone, de Miranda and Rivas returned to our room...

...A young woman suffered from a bone tumor on her leg, making it difficult for her to move, but she had been refused medical treatment from the Cuban health care system...

...Cuban dissidents who try to express views independent of or critical of the Castro regime are "often beaten, arbitrarily arrested, and subjected to public acts of repudiation," Human Rights Watch found...

...In Castro's Cuba, the experiences of the men and women of the Colegio are not the exception, but the rule...

...Offering unqualified support to the Castro regime's privatization agenda, the CTC provided the initial public calculation of its cost—the loss of a half million state sector jobs...

...Rivas is a diminutive, elderly woman, but she gave no quarter...

...Subsequent estimates by the regime have gone as high as a million state jobs...

...in practice, Cubans have been found to be in such a state and imprisoned for handing out copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, staging peaceful marches, writing news articles critical of the government, and attempting to organize independent unions...

...In a June 2010 report, Restrictions on Freedom of Expression in Cuba, Amnesty International found that in Raul's Cuba the state abridgement of fundamental freedom of speech and expression remain "systematic and entrenched...

...Civil society activists, both inside and outside Cuba, would find little to recommend in such a development: there is no evidence from the Chinese experience that the introduction of market forces, in and of itself, lead to democratization and a respect for human rights...

...Most important, for all of their market reforms, the Castros are not surrendering the prerogatives of unfettered power...

...The week before the Colegio conference, Human Rights Watch issued a report, New Castro, Same Cuba: Political Prisoners in the Post-Fidel Era, which tells the story of more than three years of human rights abuses and draconian rule—an unbroken continuation of a regime that has ordered hundreds of executions and thousands of political imprisonments in its half-century of rule...

...Mosinki spoke of his union's long but ultimately successful struggle against another authoritarian regime that called itself Communist...

...Journalists are compelled to belong to an association controlled by the Cuban Communist Party in order to practice their craft in published media, which are all under the control of a state monopoly...

...Mosinski reached over and held her hand...

...Anxiety seized us as we listened to the heated argument at the other end of the apartment...

...Amnesty International reaches a virtually identical conclusion: harassment, intimidation, arbitrary detention and imprisonment of critics of the government remain commonplace in Cuba...

...The meeting then broke up, as we left in groups of threes and fours to provide protection against physical assault, which is a common danger for dissidents in Castro's Cuba...

...The future of Cuba lies not in a regime that turns over its official publications to pages of surreal conspiracy theory, but in the men and women of the Colegio de Pedagogos Independientes, and in their fellow human rights advocates, trade unionists, independent journalists, and independent librarians...

...The Solidarity translator sitting at my side was trembling...

...Under growing pressure from hunger strikes by political prisoners, a development that reached a crescendo following the death of Amnesty International prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo and the worsening health of Cuban psychologist and journalist Guillermo Farinas Hernandez, the Cuban state announced in July 2010 that it would free those political prisoners still imprisoned from the 2003 mass arrests...

...By having the CTC lead the public roll-out of privatization, the regime made it clear that no one should look for it to defend the interests of Cuban workers...

...We arrived within minutes of each other, and De Miranda quickly began the tale of what had transpired the day before...

...Since July 2006, when Fidel Castro handed power over to his brother Raul, the authoritarianism and repression of the Cuban state have continued unabated...

...In the end, one is left not with an image of a changing Cuba, but of an authoritarian regime with an aged leadership tottering on political dementia...

...The educators of the Colegio are the brothers and sisters of American teachers, I concluded...

...Instead, the Castro regime has set on the road first blazed by the post-Maoist Chinese Communists—a transition from a command economy to a market economy, but with the authoritarian state remaining firmly in control...

...Leo Casey is a vice president of the United Federation of Teachers, the 200,000-person New York City local of the American Federation of Teachers...

...When prisoners resist "political re-education" or engage in hunger strikes, they are routinely subjected to extended solitary confinement, beatings, restrictions of visits, and the denial of medical care, New Castro, Same Cuba reports...

...In an interview with Carmen Lira Saade of the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, he apologized for the regime's past persecution of gay people, taking personal responsibility for it: If someone is responsible, he said, it's me...

...In this regard, it is telling that there is no mention of such politically sensitive occupations as education and media on the list of 178 occupations approved for privatization by the regime...

...State security had broken in...

...State security was particularly exercised over the presence of independent journalist Carlos Serpa Maceira, who has been named in a number of Amnesty International reports on Cuba as a frequent target for arrest and harassment by the Castro regime...

...Cubans can be imprisoned for "insulting" national symbols, "defaming" national institutions and heroes, and belonging to "unauthorized" associations and attending "illicit" meetings and demonstrations...

...In November 2009, sitting inside a crowded and cramped room in Havana, I received my own firsthand education in the machinery of Cuban state repression...

...De Miranda asked us to keep quiet, shut the swinging gates to our room, and rushed to the front of the apartment...

...Our state cannot and should not continue supporting [state] companies," the CTC maintained, "with inflated payrolls, losses that damage the economy, which are counterproductive, generate bad habits and deform the workers' conduct...

...We will arrest everyone...

...A New Cuban World Is Struggling To Be Born Yet the Castro regime is now hard at work to convince the outside world that change is on its way...

...Significantly, the first major statement on these changes came from Cuba's "union federation," the state-controlled Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC...

...A Repressive Regime The actions of Cuban state security against the Colegio provide a window into post-Fidel Cuba...

...You have been told that this is a counter-revolutionary and illegal meeting that must end," state security yelled, and "yet it is still going on...

...The government monitors, intimidates, and threatens those it perceives as its enemies...

...But civil society activists have found that very little has changed inside Cuba when it comes to respect for human rights and labor rights...

...A number of those prisoners have refused to participate in the release, given that they would be sent into exile, leaving hundreds of other political prisoners still imprisoned...

...De Miranda asked the international unionists to share a few words with the Cuban teachers...

...In a number of late August 2010 interviews, a resurrected Fidel Castro returned to the public eye with a public relations campaign designed to offer a portrait of a kinder and gentler Cuban Revolution...

...He represented the AFT at the 2009 conference of the Colegio de Pedagogos Independientes...

...From a declaration that it will release a number of political prisoners to an apology for past repression of gays to an acknowledgment that "the Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," the Castro regime has sought to signal that a more benevolent rule is replacing the authoritarianism of the last half-century...

...At the time, his words appeared calculated to provide support for what had been modest moves by Raul Castro to reform the impoverished, dysfunctional Cuban economy...

...As de Miranda spoke of the need to forgive the wrongs of the men of state security, invoking the nonviolent redemptive tradition of Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi, the Cuban teachers in the room wept tears of relief...

...Around the room were artifacts of the many activities that took up its days: children's art from day care and after-school sessions, bookshelves filled with the volumes of an independent library, a union placard, pictures of Cuban democratic national heroes and a large poster of Martin Luther King, and a wall dedicated to the signatures of visitors from Cuba and around the world...

...Yet in September, the Castro regime began to signal that it was embarking on radical economic change, starting with the privatization of vast parts of the Cuban state sector...

...One excerpt of Estulin approvingly quoted by Fidel postulated that the Frankfurt School scholar Theodor Adorno worked with members of the Rockefeller family to use rock music to "control the masses" and divert them from political struggle—a claim as amusing as it is outlandish, given Adorno's well-known disdain for popular music and mass culture...