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Jewish World Review May 17, 2005 / 8 Iyar, 5765 Rafael Diaz-Balart's long fight for Cuba By Kathryn Lopez
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
He could be your grampy.
That's the image many Westerners have of Fidel Castro. Oliver Stone has
called the dictator "one of the Earth's wisest people." Other media
moguls, actors and intellectuals have traveled to Havana to pay homage
and make small talk about cigars.
Hollywood's affection for Fidel makes him as chic as a Che Guevara
T-shirt (a hot item with the U.S. college set). Che, by the way, despite
his current "Motorcycle Diaries" stud-icon status, was Castro's
executioner in the younger days of the Castro regime — a thug who would
do the despot's dirty work.
But don't try to sell that harmless-old-revolutionary spin to a Cuban.
Fidel Castro is no cuddly papa to those who know his brutality all too
well. A recent Freedom House tally declared Cuba's government as one of
the most repressive on the planet.
As Florida Republican congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart once said, "For
the life of me, I just don't know how Castro can seem cute after 40
years of torturing people." Castro not only tortures and executes, he
also holds a special disdain for blacks and gays, which is why much of
Cuba's dissident movement is black.
Diaz-Balart's father, Rafael, who died earlier this month at age 79,
knew well the repressive reality of Castro's Cuba. He went from being a
close friend of Castro in their younger days to becoming one of the
tyrant's political headaches. Rafael's legacy includes not one, but two
sons in U.S. Congress.
The late Rafael was, for a time, Fidel Castro's brother-in-law, when his
sister Mirta Diaz-Balart married the dictator in the days before he
seized power. Once Castro's best friend — Rafael introduced the couple
(talk about regrets) — the marriage lasted only two years, during which
Rafael's sister Mirta bore Castro his first son. But the Diaz-Balarts
would all fall out of favor, and by the time Castro was in charge, the
Diaz-Balart family was as good as dead on Cuban soil.
Rafael, as majority leader of the Cuban house of representatives in
1955, opposed amnesty for a jailed Castro, predicting "mourning, pain,
bloodshed and misery" for the Cuban people if Castro was released.
The Diaz-Balarts were out of the country when Castro took over and after
Castro burned their house to the ground they never returned, getting
that message loud and clear. Living in Florida, Rafael was a leader of
the Castro opposition, and taught his sons to love freedom through word
and deed.
The commitment runs so deep in the Diaz-Balart blood that speaking of
their Cuba and other tyrannies, like China, Lincoln said in a 2003
interview with the National Review: "I feel almost embarrassed for the
human race that we just sit here and accept regimes like that."
As members of Congress (Lincoln was elected in 1992, Mario in 2002), the
sons have helped form a new bipartisan, bicameral Cuba Democracy Caucus
in Congress, "to promote discussion and proactive policymaking in order
to hasten Cuba's transition, Cuba's change to a free and democratic
society."
So far, eight senators and 17 congressmen from 10 states have signed up.
On the top of their to-do list is reaching out to Cuba's pro-democracy
movement, strengthening its independent media, and opposing U.S.
legislation that would ease trade and tourism embargos on the
authoritarian regime.
As the United States has stepped up efforts to penetrate beyond our
station at Guantanamo Bay, pamphlets including translations of President
Bush's second inaugural address have been making the rounds in Cuba. In
January, Bush said, "Democratic reformers facing repression, prison or
exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of
your free country."
It's a tough fight, but not without its hopes. In recent years, even old
allies have called Castro, his stubborn stranglehold on power and
bloodthirsty crackdowns on dissenters "pathetic." A former Spanish prime
minister, once an ally, said in 2003, "He is now like Franco when he was
dying."
There have been many reports of the wives, mothers, daughters and
sisters of Cuban political prisoners in Cuba standing in public to
protest the second-year anniversary of the imprisonment of 71 prisoners
of conscience — mostly journalists who were thrown in jail for not
toeing the government line and delivering the canned Castro message.
Illeana Rodriguez Saludes, the wife of a photographer sentenced to 27
years in prison, told reporters: "I will not be silenced. If I were I
might as well be dead." Castro acolytes try to shout them down whenever
they gather to protest, but the women will not pipe down, mercifully.
There are believed to be some 300 prisoners of conscience in prison in
Cuba, locked up on vague charges like "dangerousness" and "disseminating
enemy propaganda."
Lincoln recently said of his father, "His death constitutes another
reason to continue the fight for Cuba's freedom, which was the ideal of
his life, and of so many Cubans who have died longing for free Cuba."
The Rafael Lincoln Diaz-Balart legacy, both in the United States and in
his homeland, will see to it that that message of freedom spreads in
Castro's twilight.
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