Alex Antón

Notes &

Castro understood from the beginning that his vision for Latin America, sooner or later, would cause a major confrontation with the United States, it would undermine U.S. economic interest and challenge U.S. political leadership in the hemisphere. Therefore, he needed a shield against U.S. power. Obviously, only the Soviet Union had the power or the will to serve as such a shield. Consequently, on May 7, 1960, Castro established diplomatic relations with the USSR, which immediately began supplying most of Cuba’s petroleum needs. By the time the U.S. reduced importation of Cuba sugar in July 1960, Cuba was also receiving large quantities of weapons from Russia or her satellites. For the Soviets, their new relationship with the Cubans opened the door to an area previously dominated by the U.S.

In an effort to undermine Castro, U.S. administrations began to apply a series of pressures against Cuba. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy approved the CIA sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion and in 1962 got the Organization of American States (OAS) to expel Cuba from the organization. In 1964, during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, the U.S. banned the importation of all sugar from the island and instituted a full economic blockade of Cuba. In that same year, the OAS also imposed diplomatic and economic pressures on Castro, various covert operations attempts against him were being carried out by the CIA. 5

These pressures hurt Castro, but did not threaten his regime. The trade sanctions imposed by the Americas undermined his oversees economic agenda, and his own inexperience and mismanagement caused many of his domestic economic programs to go sour. 6  His consequent almost total reliance on Soviet aid produce protracted shortages of food and consumer goods on the island. Following Cuba’s expulsion from the OAS, Castro also experienced diplomatic setbacks, as several countries, among them Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Chile broke ties with Havana. Finally, the capture and execution of "Che" Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 seriously set back Castro’s announced goal of extending the Cuban revolution to the rest of Latin America. But he remained resilient.

Blocked from exporting his revolution to Latin America, Castro began to export it to Africa. Cuban forces played and active role in Angola’s civil war in 1975, and Castro’s troops were also deployed in Ethiopia in 1977, as well as, in Zaire in 1978. At home Castro began imposing severe restrictions on freedoms of speech and association, institutionalizing these restrictions in the 1976 Cuba Constitution. Although increasingly economically and militarily dependent on the Soviet Union, he maintained a remarkable degree of independence form Moscow. He remained, in the view of the world, an imposing, charismatic symbol of Marxist revolution and social change. None of the diplomatic, economic, or covert initiatives of the U.S. diminished his world stature.

Then, in the 1980’s President Ronald Reagan’s administration found a new and highly effective weapon to use against Castro, and they found it in a most unexpected place, in the cause of human rights. The seemingly sudden emergence of violations of human rights in Cuba as a viable issue, in fact, was not sudden at all. That issue had first been raised in Cuba, years before, by Ricardo Bofill Pages. It was his work and the work of his underground Cuban Committee for Human Rights that began to sway world opinion in the 1980’s. It was the documentation of human rights violations in Cuba provided by Ricardo Bofill and his committee that the U.S. later able to use to discredit Castro. The story of Bofill and his Committee for Human Rights between 1976 and 1988 is not only a remarkable story of personal commitment and courage, but the story of the origins of a dramatic shift in U.S. Cuban policy.

Ricardo Bofill Pages was born in Madruga, Cuba, a small town outside Havana. He was the only child of Pastora and Ricardo Bofill, Sr. His father was an active member of the sugar workers’ union. His mother, on the other hand, was a faithful Catholic. Bofill’s childhood was spent in a close-knit, nuclear family which faced many economic hardships. Despite the deprivations of his upbringing, Bofill persevered in pursuit of education. He entered the University of Havana in 1956, where he planned to study philosophy, with an emphasis on Latin American socio-cultural thought. A year later, Batista closed the university after a number of its students had participated in a failed coup. In spite of the turmoil, Bofill was able to obtain a year’s scholarship to study marketing in Miami. Near the end of Bofill’s year in Miami, Batista’s regime collapsed, on January 1, 1959, and was replaced by a new government composed largely of youthful revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro. Filled with hope by the promise of Castro’s revolution and exuberant, Bofill returned to Cuba five days later on January 6, 1959 and resumed his studies at the University of Havana. In his final year of studies, 1961, he became an instructor in the School of Philosophy, where he taught a course on the Age of Enlightenment.

	Mr. Ricardo Bofill - September 2007

In 1963, Bofill went abroad to attend a series of conferences and seminars on the development of Latin American social thought. His travels took him twice to the Soviet Union. His visit to the USSR made a lasting impression on his political thought. He was dismayed by the restrictions on Soviet citizens’ freedom of speech and assembly and distressed to learn from Soviet dissidents Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Yuri Orlov of the existence Soviet forced labor camps. Bofill concluded that the Soviet Communist model was not in any way in harmony with what he took to be the principles of the Cuban revolution. 8

After returning to Cuba in 1964, Bofill began discussing with his colleagues at the university the course Castro’s revolution had taken. "We were disappointed", Bofill says, "with the way the government was handling affairs". 9 The death penalty, which was prohibited by the 1940 Cuban Constitution, had been reinstated by the revolutionary government. Freedom of press and freedom of speech were rapidly disappearing. Newspaper and radio stations that criticized Castro’s handling of internal affairs had been closed, and individuals who dissented risked losing jobs or being arrested. 10

At first, Bofill kept his concerns relatively private, discussing them in the limited circles of Havana University’s faculty and students. But, as the government’s actions became more oppressive, his criticism became more public.

On July 21, 1965 Bofill organized a seminar dealing with human rights called "Los Derechos Humanos a la Luz del Derecho Internacional" (Human Rights in the Light of International Rights), which was semi clandestine and was held in Doctora Marta Frayde Havana house. In this time, Frayde was an open vocal dissident of Castro regime.

Three days after the seminar ended, on August 19, 1965, Bofill was dismissed from his teaching post, charged with "ideological diversionism". He remained unemployed until December 24, 1965, when his friend Ramon Calcines Gordillo, in the National Institute for Agrarian Reform, offered him a position as an instructor at an agricultural school. Disillusioned by undaunted, Bofill continued to criticize the government and began writing a book detailing the failure of the Russian economic model and criticizing political repression in Cuba. The latter task would occupy him between 1965 and October of 1967.  11

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