Prisoner releases under Raúl Castro raise hope for Cuba

Leader Fidel Castro ceded power to his brother last year after undergoing emergency surgery.

By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 30, 2007 edition

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Washington - When prominent Cuban human rights advocate Francisco Chaviano was released earlier this month after 13 years in prison, he joined the growing list of political dissidents set free in the year since Fidel Castro, sidelined by poor health, ceded power to his brother Raúl.

The steady fall in Cuba's political prisoner population since Raúl Castro took the reins of power in July 2006 is leading some Cuba experts to conclude that some kind of new day is dawning on the Caribbean communist island.

Just don't expect that dawn to break, they add, in anything other than the slow and cautious manner in which the release of political prisoners has been carried out.

Still, this year's decline in imprisoned dissidents does appear to be different from the periodic peaks and valleys over recent decades in Cuba's political prisoner population – a rising and falling that has often tracked US policy towards Cuba.

"I don't see this as more of the same up-down, up-down, but as part of a trend toward the release of more political prisoners," says Wayne Smith, director of the Cuba Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington. It's a trend, he adds, that like other glimmers of an opening-up of the Cuban system, "is going to be happening slowly, very slowly."

The Havana-based Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, an illegal but tolerated nongovernmental organization, reports a fall of more than 20 percent in the number of political prisoners over a year ago. The total, according to the group, stood at 246 as of June 30, down from 316 in 2006.

The number still represents by far the largest incarceration of prisoners of conscience of any country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the highest per capita rates anywhere in the world – leading some analysts to doubt that anything in Cuba has really changed.

"Yes, they have released some political prisoners, some because they fulfilled their sentences or others because of their health, but that doesn't translate into a real shift in the country," says Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. "I don't see any let-up in the repression in Cuba or [in] the harassment of the opposition people."

In some ways, Cuba is less free

Indeed, Dr. Suchlicki says, measures limiting Cubans' access to outside information sources – such as cutting off private Internet access or confiscating satellite dishes – have been stepped up. At the same time, harassment of dissidents by government-organized groups – an old tactic of the Castro regime – has continued, he adds. Groups like the Rapid Response Brigade often appear on the scene of impromptu demonstrations of rights groups like the Ladies in White, an organization of the wives of political prisoners.

What some experts see is a Cuba on standby, waiting for two shoes to drop: Fidel Castro's demise (rumors continue that is condition is deteriorating, though Cuban officials claim he is in fact recuperating from last year's illness) and the end of President Bush's term in January 2009. "I don't see a big change in the human rights situation, but I don't see it worsening either," says Uva de Aragón, associate director of the Cuba Research Institute at Florida International University. "Like most things in Cuba, it's in a waiting mode."

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