Cuba's crackdown on dissidents shows there are two sides to life on the Caridbean island, reports Déaglán de Breadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
White sands. Clear blue water. Endless bright sunshine. Who said Communism was no fun? Cuba is the sexy holiday destination of today. With a population of 11 million, the Caribbean island drew two million visitors last year. This despite a ban on direct travel by most US citizens for the past four decades.
The Buena Vista Social Club movie revealed Cuba to the world as a musical treasure-house. After a day's lounging on the beach, the visitor can surrender in the evening to the lazy Latin rhythms while dining on the fruits of Cuba's sun-drenched soil and the bounty of her seas.
The people are friendly, gregarious and funloving - sound familiar? - and the likelihood of getting mugged or having your bag snatched is almost nil.
Havana is one of the great cities of the world, a Spanish colonial jewel set in the heart of the Caribbean. Thanks to the US economic blockade, the Cubans had to retain their old American cars so the city streets are a visual feast, as bulky but elegant Studebakers, Chevrolets and Buicks roll past, like overfed models rushing to a fashion show.
No wonder Americans, in particular, love their visits to Cuba, many of them travelling via Mexico or Canada to evade the travel ban. Cuba is their past, the fun capital of the Americas in the 1950s, and it still looks exactly the same.
In addition to its more sensual charms, Cuba is an interesting place politically, perhaps the last country in the world still operating on true socialist principles, now that China has opted for the capitalist economic model. Cuba is widely admired for its success in redistributing land to the poor, eradicating illiteracy and racism, and creating one of the best healthcare systems in the world.
But there is a shadow over the socialist paradise. What looked like a gradual but growing relaxation of restrictions by the Castro regime recently gave way to a harsh and repressive crackdown on dissidents and the use of the death penalty to punish three hijackers fleeing to the US.
As the US and Britain moved towards war in Iraq last March, the Cuban government hauled in some 75 dissidents, including journalists, who were protesting for democratic change. Added to the shock was the fact that some colleagues who had worked alongside them in the dissident movement for many years were revealed to be Castro agents and they testified in court that dissident groups had received money and office equipment from the US Government.
The dissidents were convicted of anti-state activities and given heavy sentences. The most prominent among them were the independent economist Marta Beatriz Roque and the poet and journalist Raul Rivero, both of whom were jailed for 20 years, and the dissident physician Oscar Elias Biscet who received a 25-year sentence. Many of those jailed are aged between 50 and 60.
The cynics suggested Castro was using New Labour-style tactics by moving against his opponents while the world's attention was distracted by Iraq. He may also have felt that a crackdown would, in some way, deter the Bush administration from more aggressive action against Cuba.
If so, he was misguided, because there were immediate calls for President Bush to retaliate against Havana. An American travel agent I met in Cuba who makes her living organising educational tours and cultural visits, which are permitted as exceptions under US law, was extremely worried about a speech Bush is due to give in Florida on May 20th (Cuban Independence Day), where he is expected to announce a tightening of travel restrictions and possibly other measures.
It looks like things will get worse before they get better. After the success of the Iraqi walkover, a newly self-confident White House will want to give short shrift to Castro and his supporters.
Florida's votes could be just as critical in next year's presidential election as they were last time and the right-wing Cuban exile community is the key to electoral success in that state. There are signs that the European Union may also take a harsher stance towards Cuba.
Thus, although many of them are behind bars, we will be hearing a lot more about Cuban dissidents. In Cuba this week I spoke to two of them, the first being Blanca Reyes, wife of Raul Rivero.
Inevitably the meeting was somewhat fraught. Suspecting that her home would probably be under surveillance, I suggested meeting in a public place and we agreed on a downtown Havana café.
But halfway through the interview, she suggested that two men who came in and sat down at the next table were, in fact, state security police who were spying on us. She answered all questions from then on with her hand placed beside her mouth so that they could not hear.
Outlining her husband's career, Reyes listed his prizes and distinctions for poetry. As a journalist, he worked as Moscow Correspondent for the Cuban wire service, Prensa Latina, from 1973 to 1977. Speaking through an interpreter, she said "in 1989, he broke with the Revolution and rejected the Government."
In 1995, he created the Cuba Press, an agency for independent journalism. He was arrested from time to time but always let go: "they were trying to get him to leave the country". In 1997, an "act of repudiation" took place whereby some 300 or so people from around the country demonstrated outside his home with microphones, accusing him, among other things, of being part of the old Batista regime ("he was only 10 at the time of the Revolution"). He began to write for leading foreign newspapers such as El Pais and La Vanguardia in Spain and Le Monde in France. It was outside the government's control, a form of "alternative journalism".
When the dissidents began to be arrested on March 18th, Reyes was left untouched. By March 20th, his wife said to him "if they don't come today, they are not coming at all." At 4.45 pm, 16 police officers came to pick him up. This time, she says, people gathered outside and shouted protests at the police saying "he didn't do anything."
He told her during a visit last week that he was interrogated every three hours, morning and night, over a sustained period and, as a result of the strain, lost 15 kg in a month. "He was kind of fat," she says, smiling and making a wide gesture with her hands. She had wanted him to lose weight - "but not this way".
The trial took place on April 4th and lasted only seven hours. Reyes got 20 years for violating national security under "Law 88". When she told him what the sentence was, he replied: "I don't care." He is now 57 and, although I did not say it to her, the law of averages suggests her husband will die in prison.
"He believed very strongly in the Revolution," she says, but her husband became increasingly disillusioned. "He could not say what he felt and thought, so he started this alternative journalism." Essentially he wanted free speech: "to be able to write what he thought without being told what to write."
She hopes the nightmare will come to an end. "I was always a housewife but while he is in jail, I am going to continue to speak out." When we left the café after the interview, the two men at the next table also departed.
In a speech on April 21st, Fidel Castro denounced the dissident organisations as "counter-revolutionary grouplets" who were collaborating with the US diplomatic representative in Havana, James Cason, to realise the Bush administration's desire to overthrow the socialist government.
One of those named as a "counter-revolutionary ringleader" was Vladimiro Roca. It was an unlikely soubriquet for a son of the late Blas Roca, head of the Cuban Communist Party, who worked closely with Castro to create the socialist system in the country.
I met Roca at his home in the suburbs of Havana. Now aged 60, he looked surprisingly fit for a man who had spent five years in prison for his oppositionto the regime, which was characterised as sedition. "God helped keep me in good shape." Roca considers himself a social democrat and remains a Marxist "in principle". He looks to Sweden and more particularly Denmark as the model society, where the gap between rich and poor is least glaring.
Given his family background, he should be a member of Cuba's ruling elite but instead expresses disillusion with the Revolution. "The Cuban Government has made the rich people poor and the poor people even poorer," he says.
"That's why I consider myself a social democrat. The first thing you have to have in order to have socialism is democracy."
He admits his views would have disappointed his father, who died in 1987. But he believes Blas Roca had hoped to create a proper rule of law in Cuba under the 1976 Constitution - "because Fidel has never liked having limits". He dismisses Castro's claims that Cason was stirring things up and stepped outside his proper role: "Cason has not done anything outside the rules established by the Geneva Convention in terms of diplomatic relations."
Roca believes the crackdown - "La Represiva" - is a sign that the regime is in its final phase. "All repressive and totalitarian regimes become more repressive and totalitarian in their final years, that also happened with the Batista dictatorship," he says, referring to Fulgencio Batista who was overthrown by Castro.
But others besides Roca have written off Castro before. There was a story doing the rounds in Havana a few years ago that he was given a present of a Galapagos turtle and told that the creature could live up to 400 years.
Handing back the turtle, Castro said: "That's the problem with pets, you get attached to them and then they die on you."