Notes &

Bofill and his group organized other prisoners into a network that reported to CCPDH detailed accounts of atrocities inflicted upon prisoners: dark isolation cells the size of coffins, beatings, castrations, electroshock, and executions. Adolfo Rivero Caro recalled a particular incident in which several young men, "Balseros", the name given to Cubans caught attempting to leave the island on rafts, protested being lumped in with common criminals instead of being placed with the political prisoners. One day, in a show of protest, the young men refused to re-enter their cells after an exercise session. The prison authorities responded by ordering the guards to attack them with machetes. "The camage was incredible". Rivero somberly recalled "Some of the young men tried to run and got caught in barbed wire, all the while being mercilessly hacked by prison guards". 32  Rivero wrote an account of the event in a "microscopic hand" and smuggled the tiny piece of paper out of prison by passing it to a visiting family member who sent it to Miami-based Cuban exiles for publication. At the same time, human rights abuses recorded by the CCPDH were increasingly reaching foreign governments and international human rights organizations by way of channels established with foreign diplomats.

When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, U.S.-Cuban relations entered a new era, one characterized by increased hostility and aggressiveness on both sides. The change of climate would have a decisive impact on both Bofill and the CCPDH. From the outset, the Reagan administration adopted a hard-line posture vis-a-vis Cuba. U.S. foreign policy officials knew that Castro was increasingly more dependent on the Soviets economically and military. Senior administration officials, among them Assistant Secretary of State, Elliot Abrams, were convinced that "Fidel was not willing to legitimately negotiate with the U.S based on the experiences of the Carter administrations in the late 1970’s" and "Cuba’s financial and military dependence on the USSR".33 Despite these convictions, Reagan made an attempt to, at least, establish common ground with Havana by sending Ambassador -at -Large, Lt. Gen. Vernon A. Walters to Cuba. Ambassador Walters offered Castro "compensation in the form of normalization of relations with the U.S. trade, technology, and other economic benefits" in return for "cessation of destabilizing activities in third world countries and political reform within Cuba"34 His proposal was resoundingly rejected by Castro.

Castro inflexibility stemmed largely from increasing dependence on Moscow. His relationship with the Kremlin had yielded substantial advantages for the Cuban government over the past decades, advantages in the form of generous subsidies for the Cuban economy and for modernization of its armed forces. Cuba would have found it impossible to replicate such advantages elsewhere. Even the U.S. would have been hard-pressed to match the Soviet’s level of economic and military support for Havana. Because of its success in advancing Soviet interests in Africa, including securing Marxism regimes in both Angola and Ethiopia, Cuba gained particularly large economic concessions form the Soviet Union in the post-1975 period. Cuba got an increase of over $9.5 billion in Soviet assistance between 1976-1979, a 135 percent increase, for the four-year period, over the total increase in assistance provided during the previous fourteen years, 1961-1975.

To insure Cuban military triumphs in the third world, the Soviet Union significantly bolstered Castro’s military resources. Between 1970 and 1982 the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) doubled in size. Even more significant for the FAR was the acquisition of new weapons inventories, including Mig-23’s the first shipment of which arrived in the spring of 1978. Soviet arms deliveries to Cuba reached well over sixty million metric tons in 1981, a figure more than three times the level of annual deliveries in the previous five years.35 Soviet economic and military aid to Cuba also served Castro by elevating his political status among underdeveloped nations. In 1979, at the Sixth Annual Non-Aligned Movement Summit held in Havana, he was officially named leader of the organization. His election fulfilled a long-sought goal for Castro and represented the apex of his career.

In response to Castro’s increasing dependence on the USSR and his newly acquired ascendance in the third world, the Reagan administration began an even tighter economic boycott of the island. All U.S. tourist and business travel to Cuba was banned. Moreover, in a effort to thwart Cuban support of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration funneled financial assistance, military advisors, and weaponry to the Nicaraguan Contras. And the Reagan administration targeted Castro’s Achilles heel —human rights violations— for a new arrow.

The human rights issue was an unexpected assault. Documentation that Castro’s government systematically violated the thirty articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Cuba was a signatory, could be used, the Reagan administration concluded, as a vehicle to discredit Castro both in Cuba and abroad. As the U.S. permanent Ambassador to the UN, Jeanne Kikpatrick, put it, "Condemnation by the United Nations Human Rights Commission would be a heavy blow to the prestige of Fidel Castro’s government".36 Furthermore, it would interfere with Castro’s ambition to be seen as a leader of, and as a spokesman for, third world nations. Such a condemnation would impede Cuba’s efforts to improve its ties to Western Europe, Latin America, and Canada. Finally, as former Assistant Secretary of State, Elliot Abrams, said, the UN initiative was aimed at "creating a political space within Cuba that would allow for an opposition to flourish".37

The general issue of human rights had first been cited by the Carter administration as a central component of American foreign policy. In the Western Hemisphere, concern focused on Latin America, where the 1970’s marked tens of thousands of murders and disappearances and the perverse use of torture in a host of right wing dictatorships. Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Paraguay were all guilty. The deaths of between forty and fifty thousand persons in Nicaragua, most of them killed in Anastasio Somoza’s attacks on the civilian population, further raised the body count. However, Communist nations, including Cuba, with their closed societies, were much less subject to scrutiny. Carter’s efforts, perforce, had to be limited to looking at right wing dictatorships; Reagan was in a different position, at least relative to Cuba. As Elliot Abrams put it "it was not only necessary to criticize any government that was engaged in a pattern of physical abuses like El Salvador, or Chile, but also a government that had set up a repressive system where there was no democracy … no freedom of speech, no freedom of press, and that was Cuba".38

In implementing its human rights initiative relative to Cuba, the Reagan administration took a page from its Russian and Eastern European policy book. Along with such dissidents as, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and Andrei Sakharov, the administration began to mention the name of Ricardo Bofill. As a result of the recognition, Ricardo Bofill and the CCPDH found themselves in the limelight at the center of the world stage.

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