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| The Rise of the Cuban Human Rights Movement | ||||||||||||||||||
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Alex Antón While CCPDH struggled to establish itself in Cuba and to develop channels of communications with international human rights organizations, U.S.-Cuban relations entered a new phase. Since October 18, 1960, when the U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Philip Bonsal, had been recalled for "extended consultation" 23 there had been no U.S. diplomatic presence in Havana. However, after 1976, the Jimmy Carter administration became interested in possibly normalizing relations with Cuba. U.S. foreign policy makers reasoned that new political and economic agreements with Havana might moderate Castro’s behavior, or at least provide instruments for U.S. leverage, something difficult in the absence of U.S. Cuban diplomatic relations. For her part, Cuba, was feeling Soviet pressures to open détente with the United States. And normalization with Washington would offer Havana advanced technology, commercial trade, and a break in its hemispheric isolation. Thus, in April 1977, the two government signed an agreement relative to each other’s fishing grounds, the boundaries of which had been long in dispute. The following June, agreement was also reached for establishing an "Interest Section" in each capital starting in September, 1977, sort of unofficial embassies. These diplomatic steps were accompanied by an exchange of visits between U.S. and Cuban trade officials and businessmen. 24 But President Carter emphasized that Cuba respect for human rights would be a prior condition for any further moves towards normalization. Heartened by Carter’s announcement, Bofill immediately arranged to meet with Barbara Hutchinson, the cultural officer at the U.S. Interest Section in Havana. He asked if she would "forward letters he had written to Andrei Sakharov and other dissident in Europe". 25 She told him that she could not forward letters to private individuals, but that letters addressed to officials in the United States government, to the United Nations or to human rights organizations she could deliver. Bofill took her offer and began to write to American officials as well as to the United Nations, to Amnesty International, and to Americas Watch, reporting on Cuba’s dismal human rights record. Between late 1977 and early 1982, Bofill tried repeatedly to get an appointment with Lyle F. Lane and then with Wayne Smith, who in 1979 replaced Lane as the Chief of the U.S. Interest Section in Havana. But both Lane and Smith declined to see him.26 The American representatives at the Interest Section were more concerned with normalizing U.S. relations with Castro than with human rights violations. They viewed Bofill’s allegations as a side issue at best, and as a possible obstacle to normalization, at worst. The prospect of normalized relations with the U.S. never materialized because Castro’s foreign policy got in the way.27 In late 1977, Castro dispatched a second Cuban expeditionary force to Angola and combat troops to defend Ethiopia against Somalia, the latter at the request of the Marxism regime of Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam. The U.S. also learned that a shipment of Soviet Mig-23s had arrived in Cuba and the Shaba II incident involving alleged Cuban intervention in the Angolan-sponsored invasion of Zaire in May of 1978 flared up. Cuba also resumed excursions into Central America, sending military advisors and large-scale shipments of arms to Nicaragua at the end of 1978.28 In the summer of 1980, an unregulated flow of Cuban refugees to Florida, which became known as the "Mariel Boatlift", finally sealed off any possibility of normalization.29 Though Lyle F. Lane and Wayne Smith remained indifferent to Bofill’s allegations, some diplomats from other countries proved more receptive to his concerns. The Spanish Ambassador, Francisco Ortiz Sanchez met with Bofill to discuss the CCPDH’s human rights allegations and offered a communications channel to the outside world through his embassy. The French embassy also promised to forward Bofill’s reports to international human rights monitoring groups, and the Costa Rican Consul General in Havana, Oscar Vargas Bello, sent CCPDH reports directly to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. But Bofill’s increased international access was halted on April 15, 1980. That day he was arrested on charges of "enemy propaganda" and re-sentenced to eight years in Combinado del Este Prison. Prior to his arrest, Bofill had provided the world with thousands of pages documenting human rights violations in Cuba, and his efforts had begun to kindle interest in diplomatic circles and among world human rights organizations. Bofill realized that he had been living on borrowed time, that at any moment the authorities could drag him from his home to prison. He had lived a lonely existence, for most of his friends, including many of his university colleagues, had avoided contact with him. But why had the Cuban government allowed Bofill to pursue such activities for four years? The authorities had refrained from interfering with him for a number of reasons. First, they viewed Bofill as insignificant. What he had been doing produced, at the time, no significant effect in the international community. As far as Castro could see, little official attention had been paid to Bofill. Second, Castro did not want to create a martyr. The disappearance of a well-know human rights activist might focus unwanted attention on Havana. Third, the Cuban government wanted to gather as much intelligence as it could about who was associated with Bofill and who his sympathizers were, both at the embassies and among the citizenry. In short, Castro saw little, or no threat in Bofill’s activities.30 During Bofill’s second imprisonment, some of his fellow inmates became in his work and asked to join the CCPDH. He admitted between thirty and forty new members, all of whom were political prisoners who had, in some way or another, crossed the Castro government. Among the new members were former University of Havana philosophy professor, Adolfo Rivero Caro and former University of Havana economics professor, Enrique Hernández Mendez. The most impressive new member of the CCPDH, who later would become its secretary general, was Gustavo Arcos Bergnes. Arcos has been Castro’s former ambassador to Belgium and the Netherlands. He had been one of the founders of the Cuban revolution and had been Castro’s right hand man in the famous attack on Batista’s Army barracks in July 1953.31 |