Something to Protest

Since Val's taking a beach day, I thought I'd pick up on a story that's really in his milieu.

The wives of 15 Cuban political prisoners jailed in last year's crackdown on dissent held a rare public march in Havana's streets Friday demanding amnesty for their husbands.

The women -- dressed all in white, with many pinning their husbands' photographs to their chests -- started their march early Friday at the well-known Coppelia ice cream restaurant in the city center.

"Freedom for the 75 political prisoners!" the women shouted as they marched up to Department of Prisons headquarters seven blocks away.

There, they submitted a letter to the department's director, Gen. Rafael Calderin Tamayo, demanding freedom for their husbands and improved prison conditions.

Authorities did not interfere with the march, which lasted about 21/2 hours.

Several men who appeared to be plainclothes police officers were seen along the way, watching the protest from a distance. A green Peugeot sedan slowly followed the group while someone inside videotaped the procession.

Havana has justified the crackdown, saying it has the right to defend the nation from foreign attempts to change its socialist system.

"Cuba claims the right to apply the law to defend itself from aggression," Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva on Wednesday.

"Cuba claims its right to put on trial those mercenaries who collaborate with the (U.S. economic) blockade and aggressive policies by the superpower, which wishes to re-conquer and subjugate our people."

Seventy-four men and one woman were arrested March 18, 2003, and accused of being mercenaries working with American officials to undermine Fidel Castro's government. The prisoners -- including independent reporters, democracy activists and opposition party members -- and the U.S. government deny the charges.

After one-day closed trials, they were sentenced to between six and 28 years in prison.

John Walker Lindh was found on the battlefield fighting with America's enemies and received 20 years in jail. The jailed in Cuba, many of them librarians, who provided books that Castro didn't like, have potentially been sentenced to more time. And you can bet that the jail Johnny Taliban is in is like the Hyatt compared to the gulag in Cuba.

"They are unjustly jailed," said Dolia Leal, wife of Nestor Aguilar, sentenced to 13 years.

"We have the sacred right to fight for our families," said Loyda Valdes, whose husband, Alfredo Felipe Fuentes, is serving 26 years.

The wives also took a bus to the Miramar neighborhood, where they marched more than 30 blocks down the main Quinta Avenida thoroughfare to National Assembly headquarters.

The women delivered a letter addressed to parliament President Ricardo Alarcon seeking amnesty for the prisoners.

That gesture "would be very well received by the Cuban people and by the international community," the letter said.

Governments and rights groups around the world roundly condemned last year's crackdown and the unrelated executions of three men who tried to hijack a passenger ferry to the United States.

Washington responded by further tightening restrictions on travel to Cuba.

There's video of the march here. (There's no permalink so it may not be there for long. It's an AP report but I couldn't find it easily on their site.)

And here's a heartbreaking article focusing on Blanca Reyes whose husband, Raul Rivero, is serving 20 years.

These 15 women stand in stark contrast to the buffoons marching yesterday with in their Che t-shirts and "Workers Struggle" signs, condemning our government for striving to bring freedom to parts of the world where people only uttered the word under their breath and even then cautiously for fear of informants and secret police. Meanwhile, the protesters in NYC, SF, DC, free to be as dumb as they want here, say the most irrationally vile things about "BushCheneyRumsfeld" and unless they popped a cop were free to go get their soy lattes on their walks back home. In Cuba one of the idealized utopias of their dreams, people are going to jail for almost 30 years for being in possession of a copy of Animal Farm.