Chronicle on Cuba - February 2005

Exile Community

February 2: The representative of the Committee for Freedom and Democracy in Cuba, Maykell Barroso, asked the European Union (EU) to show its support for Cuban dissidents by attending the plenary meeting to be held on the island next May 20 under the auspices of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society, an officially unrecognized organization led by Martha Beatriz Roque. (AFP, 2/2/05)

February 10: Cuban exiles closed ranks to oppose a draft bill to increase sales of US agro products to Cuba and were confident that President George W. Bush would veto the initiative should the Congress pass it. “It will be an important but by no means easy battle for those who do not understand that trade with Cuba only helps the tyrant (Fidel Castro),” said Ninoska Pérez Castellón, head of the Cuban Liberty Council. Pérez highlighted the unanimous position on that issue of Cuban-American legislators Mel Martínez, Bob Menendez, Ileana Ross-Lehtinen, Lincoln Díaz-Balart and Mario Díaz-Balart. (EFE, 10/2/05)

February 11: South Florida's Cuban-American US representatives expressed support for an upcoming gathering of dissidents in Cuba, saying the conference will mark the beginning of the end for Castro's government. "It's important to realize that the people of Cuba are working awfully hard for their freedom," said US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart (Republican-Miami), at a news conference also attended by Republican Representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, as well as members of Cuban exile groups. "The days of tyranny are numbered." The first general meeting of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society, an umbrella organization of 365 dissident organizations, is scheduled to take place in Havana on May 20, Cuba's independence day. There, dissidents plan to discuss how to re-establish civil society and democracy in Cuba. (KRT, 11/2/05)

February 21: Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante died in a London hospital. He was 75. He was one of the most original voices in 20th-century Spanish literature and an outspoken and unforgiving critic of Fidel Castro. Guillermo Cabrera Infante had long been lauded for a Joycean, experimental use of language in his novels, essays and cinema criticism. In 1997, he won the Miguel de Cervantes prize for literature, the most prestigious literary award in the Spanish-speaking world. His effervescent novel “Tres Tristes Tigres”, published in English as “Three Trapped Tigers”, captured the rum-soaked, salacious Havana of the late 1950s and became a classic of Cuban literature. He had actively opposed dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, and after Castro took power in 1959, Cabrera Infante became a cultural representative for the new government in Brussels from 1962 to 1965. By 1965, his discontent with the totalitarian direction of the Castro government led to a break over a highly critical interview. Cabrera Infante then sought refuge in London, where he has lived the last four decades, authoring “La Habana para un infante difunto” (published in English as “Infante's Inferno”) and “Mea Cuba”, among other works. [See also Domestic Affairs] (The Miami Herald, EFE, The Globe and Mail, Reuters, 22/2/05)

February 24: Nine years after the downing of two of its light planes and the killing of four pilots, the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue asked US President George W. Bush to bring Fidel Castro to trial for the deed. Brothers to the Rescue president Jose Basulto said that then-President Bill Clinton bears some responsibility for the 1996 incident - in which Cuban air force fighter jets fired on the unarmed planes off the communist island's northern coast - because if he would have agreed to defend the exile aircraft they would not have been shot down. "That must be made known, and the current government is covering up for Clinton," Basulto said. "The United States didn't do anything to Fidel Castro that day. Moreover, Clinton prevented the departure of the US (military fighters), with their pilots already in the cockpits, that were about to take off and rescue us," he asserted. (EFE, 24/2/05)