Amy Knight: da literatura russa do século XIX para o Estado policial do século XX e XXI - New York Review of Books

 Amy Knight era apenas uma apreciadora da literatura soviética, quando foi detida pela KGB. Isso lhe deu uma nova direção em suas leituras, pesquisas e livros.

Online this week

On Thursday, we published “Aleksei Navalny, Ready to Run Again in Russia,” by the historian and longtime New York Review contributor Amy Knight. She reviews the prospects for Navalny, the anti-corruption opposition politician who survived a poisoning attempt with the nerve agent Novichok, thanks to treatment in Germany, and is now planning a return to Russia to resume his mission as a thorn in the side of President Vladimir Putin.

Knight has become known as one of the West’s leading scholars of the KGB, from her first book, a study of the secret police published in 1988, through subsequent ones on Stalin’s henchman Lavrenty Beria and cold war spying, to her most recent, Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder (2017). Although her first love had simply been the literature of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which made her want to learn the Russian language, the course of her future research was set while she was studying at the University of Michigan.

“A study tour of the Soviet Union with fellow students and professors in the summer of 1967—the height of the cold war—resulted in my brief arrest by the KGB, which took a dim view of our group’s consorting with their dissident students,” she told me via email this week. “After that experience, I became fascinated with the Soviet dissident movement and the efforts of the Soviet regime to suppress it.”

She pursued graduate studies at the LSE and embarked on her career as a Soviet affairs analyst at the Library of Congress, followed by teaching positions at Johns Hopkins, George Washington, and Carleton universities. The dissolution of the Soviet Union is now some thirty years distant, but I was curious to know what those epochal events had meant at the time for a Sovietologist—was she ever worried about being out of a job? 

“On the contrary, the Soviet collapse created huge opportunities because we finally could visit Russia in person,” she replied. “And the Soviet archives suddenly opened up—a treasure trove of files and documents on the hitherto secret operations of the Communist Party leadership. I was able to travel to Russia and do research and interviews, including with a former KGB chief, several times in the early and mid-Nineties. This was the golden age for Western Russia experts and scholars.”

The halcyon era did not last long. By the latter part of the decade, she explained, the shutters were coming down again and her access to such sources ended.

“Once Putin became firmly entrenched in power it became risky for people like me, who were so critical of Putin, to visit Russia. The last time I was in Moscow, March 2008, I was well aware that I was being watched wherever I went to do interviews,” she said. “Shortly before I left Moscow, I became violently ill with what I assumed was food-poisoning from eating at the Marriot Hotel on Tverskaya Street. But in retrospect, I saw the incident as a warning and have not attempted to return to Moscow since then.”

There was no confusing Navalny’s illness with food-poisoning. Placed in a medical coma by Russian doctors, and then flown to Germany for specialist—and safe—treatment, he was lucky to survive. Until this moment, the opposition leader had faced repeated arrests and legal harassment on apparently spurious and politically motivated charges. Why had he now, I asked Knight, faced an assassination attempt that had the Kremlin’s fingerprints on it?

“Navalny addresses the single most important weakness of Putin’s regime: official corruption,” she explained. “The Russian people are suffering terribly economically, and the more they learn about the vast sums of money that Putin’s cronies are pocketing at their expense, the more receptive they are to Navalny’s calls for protest.”

Knight’s article this week read to me as relatively optimistic about what Navalny might still achieve once back in Russia, despite Putin’s iron control of the state security apparatus, the media, and an ersatz electoral process. Will the incoming Biden administration make much difference, I asked.

“Putin has made it clear in his public comments over the years that a strong NATO alliance is one of the greatest threats to his regime,” she said. “The most important thing for Biden in his strategy toward Russia is to repair our alliance with our European allies and act in concert with them in responding to the human rights abuses of the Kremlin. The sanctions that Navalny and his colleagues have advocated are a good example.

“I think that Russian democrats are very relieved to see that Trump will be out of the White House,” she added, “because Trump turned a blind eye to Putin’s human rights abuses.”

—Matt Seaton

 

For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.

O caminho do totalitarismo - Uki Goñi (NYRBooks)

Uma sociedade que separa as crianças dos pais, já está no caminho do totalitarismo.
Isso aconteceu, pela primeira vez, no período do Holocausto nazista.
Voltou a acontecer sob a ditadura militar argentina.
E foi o que fez o governo Trump, recentemente...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Uki Goñi at The Buenos Aires Herald, in 1982

On the NYR Daily this week

The New York Review of Books, August 25, 2018

The genesis of “‘Silence Is Health’: How Totalitarianism Arrives,” Uki Goñi’s chilling essay about how a society slides from democracy to dictatorship, was a conversation on a warm Sunday afternoon in early fall last year on a park bench looking out over New York Harbor. Uki had just given a talkat the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan about how his country, Argentina, had offered sanctuary to numerous Nazi war criminals, including, most notoriously, Adolf Eichmann. It’s a story brilliantly told in his 2002 book on the subject, The Real Odessa.

Because we’d worked together in the past, Uki had asked me to be his interlocutor at the event, and it was afterwards, outside in the September sunshine, that we got to talking about authoritarianism, the 1976–1983 military dictatorship in Argentina, and the disturbing trends in American politics. And that was the seed of what became this week’s featured essay on the Daily. I asked Uki how he’d come to make these connections.

“Researching the Nazi arrivals helped me understand how secret policies are decided on and carried out, in this case the Vatican, Argentine, and Swiss policies to aid fleeing Nazis,” he said. “I also wanted to determine if it was just a historical coincidence that Nazi-like extermination policies were carried out in the country where so many Nazis found refuge after the war.”

The essay relates how Uki had a ringside seat for the deadly collapse of democracy in his country, when he went to work for the English-language Buenos Aires Herald, the only newspaper to report on the junta’s abuses even as thousands of people were “disappeared.” Didn’t he feel vulnerable, wasn’t it terrifying?

“You did it despite the fear. It was like being in a slow-motion car crash. You knew you’d come out damaged, but there was no way out,” he said. The paper’s ethos owed much to its editor Robert Cox—though, eventually, he was forced into exile by death-threats.

“After Cox left, the newspaper toned down its human rights reporting,” Uki recalled. “It was a sad, muted epilogue to a truly unique journalistic crusade to save lives.”

One of the most telling moments in the piece, for me, was an epiphany about family separation. Among the Argentine dictatorship’s roundup of opponents were several hundred pregnant women; the regime waited until they had given birth before executing them, placing their orphaned babies with approved conservative-Catholic, “patriotic” families. This chimed with me because General Franco’s Falangist Spain had done the exact same thing, and on an industrial scale, as I learned this week in Omar Encarnación’s powerful essay “Spain Exhumes Its Painful Past.” But I know that’s not what Uki, who grew up in the US, was thinking of when he wrote: “A society that separates children from their parents, for whatever reason, is a society that is already on the path to totalitarianism.” 

Considering that, I was rather desperate for some ray of hope—and I wanted to get Uki’s perspective on how a renewal of democracy, too, can come about, since he had seen out the junta’s bloody rule. “Argentina is a unusual case in that it put its own generals on trial after the return of democracy. But the dictatorship did not fall because of widespread civic resistance, or outspoken politicians or churchmen demanding its end,” he explained. “[It] fell because its mismanagement of the economy left it no other choice but to take the exit door. It was not the triumph of good; it was more evil taking a rest.”

Hmm. Not quite the sunburst of optimism I was looking for. The nearest to that, perhaps, came from the surprise gift Uki sent along after we’d posted his piece—a tweetfrom the British ambassador to the Argentine Republic, Mark Kent: “Total respect to @ukigoni. Military dictatorship is abhorrent wherever and whenever. Well said Uki.” Now, that is Excellency.

For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the NYR Dailysection of our site. And remember, you can reach the editors of the Daily, me and Lucy McKeon, with your comments and feedback via daily@nybooks.com.

Matt Seaton

Editor,NYR Daily

Triste fim de Policarpo Snowden Philby - Amy Knight (NYRBooks)

Snowden in Exile

Amy Knight

New York Review of Books, August 31, 2013

The revelation this week that former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden had already received help from the Russian government during his sojourn in Hong Kong in June—according to reports, he even stayed at the Russian consulate for two days before flying to Moscow—has put a new perspective on his relations with the Kremlin. Over the summer, there has been much debate about whether Snowden is a courageous whistleblower or a traitor. Even if he started out closer to the former, his protection by the Russians may increasingly make him appear a defector who fled one country in order to serve another.

Snowden is an unlikely spy. As some have argued, by exposing secret and possibly illegal government security programs to a global public, he was acting against uncontrolled state power everywhere—something that might be particularly threatening to the Kremlin. Russia has a far more pervasive security apparatus than the US does, and is known for dealing aggressively with anyone who tries to criticize it. There is no word in the Russian language that accurately describes “whistle-blowing.” If one of Russia’s citizens had done what Snowden did, he or she would already be serving a life sentence in a labor camp.

But Snowden’s revelations about extensive US government eavesdropping (including on American citizens and friendly Western governments) were also an unexpected propaganda boon for Moscow, though at the cost of increased tension in its relations with the White House. After being criticized by the Americans for years over its human rights violations, Russia was finally able to point the finger back at them for “persecuting” Snowden. (While Snowden was still in limbo in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport earlier this summer, Russian President Putin announced that his government would not grant Snowden asylum unless he agreed to stop revealing information that would “harm the interests of the US.” Clearly, that was just posturing, apparently in order to persuade President Obama to keep his commitment to meet with Putin in Moscow in September for bilateral talks, which Obama has since declined to do.)

But offering asylum to Snowden may bring more tangible benefits to Russia as well. The Russian security services have no doubt demanded access to the laptops Snowden brought with him. And they will also insist on debriefings. As the Associated Press recently pointed out,

The disclosure of Snowden’s hacking prowess inside the NSA also could dramatically increase the perceived value of his knowledge to foreign governments, which would presumably be eager to learn any counter-detection techniques that could be exploited against U.S. government networks.

Snowden has already been accused by the US Justice Department of violating two clauses of the 1917 Espionage Act by engaging in “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “the willful communication of classified intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” along with theft of government property. (Bradley Manning was found guilty of similar espionage charges this month.) If Snowden complies with Russian requests for information about the NSA—or for that matter, about the CIA, an earlier employer—then he leaves himself vulnerable to the further and much more serious charge, under the Espionage Act, of “aiding the enemy.”

Is Snowden’s flight to Russia turning him into precisely the traitor US authorities accuse him of being? Coincidentally, it was fifty years ago in June that the world learned the shocking news about another Westerner who fled to Russia, the former high-level British intelligence officer Kim Philby. It is probably unfair to draw comparisons between Snowden and Philby, whose betrayal of his country as a double agent did unprecedented damage and cost many lives. Snowden was not an agent of a foreign state, and was apparently motivated to divulge NSA secrets to journalists by his indignation at the discovery of the NSA’s pervasive and intrusive eavesdropping program. But the longer Snowden remains in Russia, at the mercy of his Russian hosts, the greater the chances of his ending up like Philby and living the life of a man without a country.

Philby, as is well known, began operating as an agent of the Soviets during his years at Cambridge in the 1930s. After he joined MI6 (British foreign intelligence) and rose to become the head of counterintelligence against the Soviets, Philby was privy to MI6’s most sensitive information, including the identities of the “moles” the British had recruited within the Soviet secret services and the contents of intelligence communications between Britain and its allies. He also worked, from 1949 to 1952, in Washington as the British liaison officer to the CIA and the FBI, which gave him additional access to top secret American intelligence, such as the Venona project, which involved decoding intercepts of secret Soviet communications worldwide. Philby was by far the most valuable agent that the Soviets ever recruited. Though there were suspicions about him for much of the 1950s, he managed to evade conclusive discovery of his perfidy by the British until January 1963, when he was forced to flee secretly—and with Soviet help—from Beirut to Moscow.

Philby’s treatment after his defection does not bode well for what Snowden might expect in Moscow. Philby was provided with ample material comforts but, according to Rufina Philby, the Russian woman he married in 1971, he “suffered greatly from having nothing to do and feeling unwanted.” Sometime in the 1960s, he even tried to take his own life—by slitting his wrists. Philby was very much at the mercy of his handlers, who kept him isolated from Soviet society, such as it was, and bugged his flat and telephone. He was not invited to KGB foreign intelligence headquarters, at Yasenevo, until 1977, a full fourteen years after his arrival in Moscow. At some point he began giving occasional lectures at a safe house in Moscow to young KGB trainees who were heading for diplomatic posts in the West. But much of his time was spent drinking at home. The ravages of alcohol addiction, from which he had suffered well before his defection, continued to plague him until he died in 1988.

Whatever Snowden’s intelligence value to the Russians, he will not necessarily be treated any better than Philby. He is twenty-one years younger than Philby was when he arrived in Moscow. He can probably, as Philby did not, master the Russian language if he puts his mind to it. And he reportedly has been offered a job by the Russian on-line social network VKontakte, as a specialist in protecting the security of its subscribers’ communications. (A great irony, given the well-documented efforts of the Russian security services to penetrate and control social networking sites.) Snowden presumably also has access to the world beyond Russia through the Internet, while Philby lived in Moscow under an assumed name, once a week picking up outdated British newspapers from a post-office box, and had only occasional visits from his children living in Britain.

But Snowden will nonetheless feel isolated and tightly controlled by Russian authorities. His lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who Snowden selected from two names offered him to by the Russian border police at the airport, is known to have close ties with both the Kremlin and the Federal Security Service (FSB), which controls the border police.

Kucherena’s background, and the fact that he serves as chairman of a board for public oversight of the police and security services, including the FSB, suggest that he will do everything he can to orchestrate the Snowden case in accordance with the Kremlin’s interests. Kucherena has also said publicly that, while his client can live in a hotel or rent an apartment, “the personal safety issue is a very serious one for him.” So Snowden won’t be strolling around Red Square or going out to Moscow’s bars and restaurants for entertainment.

More to the point, he is bound to suffer disillusionment with his new hosts—perhaps like what happened to Philby, who arrived with far stronger ideological commitments. In an interview while he was still in Hong Kong in June, Snowden, referring to the interception of private communications by the NSA, said, “I do not want to live in a society that does this sort of thing.” He did not foresee that he would find himself now in a place where his every move and every contact would be monitored by a government that is far more controlling of its citizens than its American counterpart.

August 31, 2013, 9 a.m.

Gutenberg morreu falido (os editores de hoje jogam a conta para os autores...)

Correto: pretendendo imprimir a Bíblia, Gutenberg não tinha mesmo a quem pedir dinheiro. Se ao menos ele tivesse começado por livros de auto-ajuda, ou receitas de negócios para executivos, ele teria alguma chance de ficar rico, mas essa aventura da Bíblia só podia arruiná-lo.
Bem, não seja por isso: os editores, atualmente, só querem ser capitalistas sem riscos. Livros que não têm um mercado muito seguro, tem de estar pagos antes de serem lançados ao público.
Por outro lado, Gutenberg não teve de pagar copyright aos chineses, por ter copiado o princípio dos tipos móveis dos impressores chineses.
Os chineses estão descontando hoje, copiando tudo o que podem dos ocidentais.
Acho que eles exageram um pouco: os últimos filmes de Hollywood podem ser encontrados nas esquinas de grandes cidades chineses por cerca de 1,2 dólares.
Onde está a honestidade?, como diria nosso Noel Rosa...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Start the Presses
By ROBERT PINSKY
The New York Times Book Review, August 13, 2010

THE BOOK IN THE RENAISSANCE
By Andrew Pettegree
Illustrated. 421 pp. Yale University Press. $40

“The humanist mythology of print.” With this phrase the British scholar Andrew Pettegree indicates the cultural story his book amends, and to some extent transforms. In an understated, judicious manner, he offers a radically new understanding of printing in the years of its birth and youth. Print, in Pettegree’s account, was never as dignified or lofty a medium as that “humanist mythology” of disseminated classics would suggest.

The story begins with money. Johannes Gutenberg did not find a way to profit from his technical achievements. The Gutenberg Bible, a gigantic project, required large amounts of capital that needed replenishing over time, long before there was any hope of profit. The finished product inspired awe, but the print run was 180 copies. Gutenberg “died bankrupt and disappointed.”

Nor was he alone. Apparently, it took decades before some people figured out how to make money from this remarkable invention. For decades after Gutenberg, it was not even clear that print would become a success. How do you market books? How many should you run off at one time? Piracy was a problem, as were texts changed, mutilated or combined in unauthorized editions. Many printers were ruined, trying to exploit the new medium.

Clever authors like Ludovico Ariosto involved themselves in production: he arranged to supply paper for the printing of his “Orlando Furioso.” Producers of the physical book made most of the money, Pettegree explains, so “the best that the author could hope for was that the publication would enhance his career.” The nature and concept of “publishing” needed to evolve, and Pettegree sets forth that evolution with an expert abundance of information: delicious for us nonscholars to taste, though we may not consume it all.

The publishing approaches that succeeded will not be unfamiliar to readers of our own century. About the world of posters, handouts, pamphlets, pictures, almanacs, prophecies, topical poems, hoaxes and one-page documents, Pettegree says, in a sentence that ends with three recognizable nouns: “Many people, printers, sellers and writers, saw the potential of this market for news, sensation and ­excitement.”

“News, sensation and excitement” might, for some customers, include the printed scripts of plays that had been well received on the stage, like Christopher Marlowe’s “Massacre at Paris” and some of Shakespeare’s history plays. None of those niche-audience printings were as successful as reliably popular best sellers like the (possibly excitement-providing) sermons of Arthur Dent, or More and Dering’s “Short Catechism for Householders.” Erasmus was a best-selling author, as was Luther, but ephemeral material supplied the main business of the early publishing industry. Classical authors, we are told, accounted for “around 5 percent of all printed books published in the 15th century.”

Like sensation and news, personal and family documents sold well. In the days of papal indulgences, people liked a certificate, perhaps suitable for framing like a diploma, to display their freedom from sin. Over two years at the end of the 15th century, a single monastery commissioned 200,000 of these documents, with a space for the sin-free name to be filled in.

Often printers made money from works published on demand for free distribution, with the revenue coming from its advertising value. As an example, Pettegree cites the Jesuit order, which linked public shows and performances to printed records, programs and scripts. In 1588, a parade in Lisbon celebrated a Jesuit establishment that boasted a public library and several recently donated relics, “including the skull of St. Bridget of Ireland and the undershirt of the Virgin Mary.” As the parade went through the city, it paused twice for “the staging of edifying plays.” Pettegree observes that this lavish display represents the “astute manipulation of different media,” a coordination he calls “a ubiquitous feature of the first age of print.”

The “fluid, transitional nature of communication” during printing’s first heyday naturally attracted detractors. “This is what the printing presses do: they corrupt susceptible hearts” wrote the “dyspeptic Benedictine” Filippo de Strata. Clumsy and unreliable editions led to “the charge that print had debased the book.” By making book ownership more common, print also “diminished the lustre of the Renaissance library,” causing many collections to dwindle or dissolve altogether as “the library as a cultural institution struggled to adapt to the new age.”

For a time, civil and religious authorities controlled the immense scale of explosive information and misinformation. When the Protestant Henry of Navarre ascended to the French throne in 1589, the news was available to English readers in “at least 40 pamphlets,” while his 1594 conversion to Roman Catholicism “was greeted with deafening silence in London.” Gradually, however, centralized control was overwhelmed by the reckless abundance of the tumultuous, street-oriented press. Petty gossip, ignorant screeds, inflammatory pamphlets and religious tracts flowed and overflowed.

The new technology also led to large-scale, faith-based burning of both books and people. The papal bull of excommunication that Martin Luther burned in 1520 also ordered that his books be destroyed. Luther in turn planned to add the works of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus to the flames, but, as Pettegree notes, “books were expensive” and the scholars of Wittenberg were unwilling to make such a sacrifice. The “genocidal rage” engendered by religious differences included populations as well as their books. In Spain, Julián Hernández and his heretical colleagues were burned alive along with “many thousands of books.” In Geneva, the physician and theologian Michael Servetus — who to his misfortune correctly described the circulation of blood but published the information in a text that also took an unorthodox view of the Trinity — was burned, as were copies of the book. Of perhaps a thousand printed, only three survive.

Pettegree writes well and amasses information superbly. He refrains from explicitly comparing the technology of print, and its historical impact, with the technology of the Internet. Implicit similarities include issues of intellectual property and privacy, of power, of libel, as well as a general challenge to old modes — the proliferation of personal expression, the contentiousness, the question of how to capitalize, and capitalize upon, a new medium.

This scholarly restraint, leaving his readers to compare and contrast, seems wise. And there are certainly contrasts with the modern age. Describing the immensely popular verse romances like “Orlando Furioso,” for example, Pettegree shows that in the Renaissance these works were not read in the prolonged, silent trance experienced by readers of Dickens or Flaubert. Modern readers recognize the quiet, lone hours spent by Henry James’s character Isabel Archer, that immersive reading experienced not only by devotees of James but by escapist fans of the genre known as “airport books.” In contrast to this industrial-age solitude of print narrative, the 16th-century verse romances and other episodic books like “The Decameron” were suited for reading aloud — enjoyed in a communal, social setting.

In an appended “Note on Sources,” Pettegree allows himself to acknowledge that, “Ironically, it has been the next great information revolution — the Internet — that has allowed this work on the first age of print to be pursued to a successful conclusion.” Digital information newly available from all over the world enhanced his research on early print culture — in all its frequently vulgar, ephemeral, zany and menacing variety.

Robert Pinsky is the poetry editor of Slate and the founder of the Favorite Poem Project (favoritepoem.org).

Desde Cuba - nada mudou, de fato

Não é preciso repetir, resumir, sequer citar ou comentar o artigo abaixo, sobre a situação dos direitos humanos em Cuba. Tudo isso é muito conhecido.
Meu único comentário se dirige aos escritores Gabriel Garcia Marquez e José Saramago: se trata não apenas de dois covardes, mas de dois seres abjetos, pois que, conhecendo a situação de Cuba, e o sofrimento dos prisioneiros de consciência, e tendo a audiência de que desfrutam nos meios de comunicação e, sobretudo entre os meios de (suposta) esquerda), preferem ficar calados, alegadamente para não "beneficiar a direita, o imperialismo, os inimigos de Cuba", ou seja lá quem for.
São uns covardes, que não merecem a designação de escritores; são apenas anões morais, como aliás vários outros aqui mesmo no Brasil, e não apenas nos meios literários.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Cuba—A Way Forward
by Daniel Wilkinson, Nik Steinberg
The New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010

In a 1980 interview, Gabriel García Márquez told The New York Times that he had spent three years writing a book about life in Cuba under Fidel Castro. But, he said, “now I realize that the book is so critical that it could be used against Cuba, so I refuse to publish it.”

In view of the Colombian author’s past concern for the victims of Latin America’s authoritarian regimes, it seems likely that what he called a “very harsh, very frank book” addressed Castro’s systematic repression of dissent: the rigged trials behind closed doors, the abysmal “reeducation” camps, the long prison sentences. Castro’s methods may have seemed relatively tame when compared with the mass slaughter of civilians by US-backed regimes throughout the region, for example in Guatemala. Yet as the cold war ended, these dictatorships gradually gave way to civilian rule, and the Castro government was left standing as the only one in the hemisphere that continued to repress virtually all political dissent. García Márquez’s book remained unpublished.

The fact that Latin America’s most renowned writer would censor himself in this way may actually say more about the plight of Cubans under Castro than anything in his manuscript. For the notion that to criticize Cuba is to abet its more powerful enemies was, for Fidel Castro, the key to achieving what his prisons alone could not—ensuring that his critics on the island remained isolated and largely ignored.

For years, many believed that the last thing keeping the region’s democratic tide from sweeping across Cuba was the unique force of Fidel Castro’s character—the extraordinary combination of charisma and cunning with which he inspired and corralled his supporters, provoked and outmaneuvered his enemies, and projected himself onto the big screen of world politics. Under his leadership, Cuba had made impressive gains in health care, education, and the eradication of extreme poverty. But the promise of the Cuban Revolution had been undercut by years of chronic deprivation, exacerbated by the US embargo, and brought to the brink of collapse by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which had propped up the island’s economy for decades. Democracy would come to Cuba—the thinking went—as soon as Fidel Castro was no longer standing in its way.

Then in June 2006, his health failing, Castro was forced to step down formally after nearly five decades in power. And nothing happened. No popular uprising in the streets, no Party shake-up, no coup. Instead, his younger brother, Raúl, took up power and, though lacking Fidel’s charisma, was able to keep the country running smoothly. Within months, it seemed clear that Cuba’s single-party system could continue without Fidel at the helm.

Some still held out hope that Raúl Castro would begin a process of political reform, a Cuban perestroika. Those looking for signs of an opening pointed to several of Raúl’s early actions, including state-sponsored public forums ostensibly aimed at encouraging criticism of government policies and the signing of the two major international human rights treaties.

But was Raúl Castro allowing genuine criticism of his government? Was the repressive machinery being eased or even dismantled? A year ago Human Rights Watch set out to answer these questions. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. The Cuban government welcomes tourists to the island, but has for years denied access to international rights monitors. Foreign journalists are followed around by undercover agents: their e-mails are monitored and their phones tapped. Those who publish in-depth stories on controversial issues face expulsion.

Our first step was to write to the Cuban government requesting authorization to visit the island. Human Rights Watch does not normally request permission to do its work, but it seemed like a good way to test whether the government’s attitude had changed. The government never responded.

We then got in touch with several local dissidents. Outside of Cuba, people often refer to “the dissidents” as though they are a single, unified political group. They are not. They do not share a single ideology or objective. Rather, the dissident community is made up of a variety of Cubans scattered across the island, some of whom belong to small groups, and others who work alone. A dissident may be someone who writes articles critical of the government, attempts to form an independent labor union, or simply refuses to attend meetings of a local revolutionary committee. What ties these people together is that they engage in activities that the Cuban government considers contrary to its policies, and therefore “counterrevolutionary.”

We obtained reports of alleged government abuses from several unauthorized human rights groups in Cuba, whose leaders have persevered over the years despite tapped phone lines, restricted mobility, frequent police raids, and periods in jail, relying on a few committed volunteers to compile lists of political prisoners and testimony about violations. But tracking down the alleged victims to corroborate these reports often took weeks. E-mail access on the island is virtually nonexistent, and many families outside of Havana do not have phone lines. When we were able to get through by phone, some people were too frightened to speak. Others spoke cryptically to avoid arousing the suspicion of listening ears. Still others spoke freely until their lines went dead, mid-sentence. While we did manage to conduct some full-length interviews, it became increasingly clear that the only way to get the full story would be to visit the island.

It would prove to be the most difficult research mission Human Rights Watch had undertaken in the region in years. Our team entered on tourist visas and traveled the length of the island by car, telling no one in advance that we were coming and never staying in any town for more than one night.1 The fear we had sensed over the phone was even more palpable on the ground. Some people became so uneasy talking about government abuses that we cut short the interviews and moved on. Several alerted us to watching neighbors who monitored suspicious activity for the local Revolutionary Defense Committees. A Baptist minister, when asked about human rights, told us quietly that what we were doing was illegal and asked us to produce identification.

Yet many people welcomed us into their homes, where they spoke frankly of their experiences. Small boxes and folders were brought out from beneath beds and inside kitchen cabinets, with official documents that corroborated their stories. Among much else, we were shown a court ruling from a dissident’s trial, which his wife and children were not allowed to attend; a parole order warning a journalist that he could be returned to prison at any time; a letter denying a critic of the government permission to travel.

Piece by piece, the evidence stacked up. The human rights treaties had not been ratified or carried out. The “open” forums to discuss government policies were governed by strict rules that prohibited any talk of reforming the single-party system. More than one hundred political prisoners locked up under Fidel remained behind bars, and Raúl’s government had used sham trials to lock away scores more. These new prisoners included more than forty dissidents whom Raúl had imprisoned for “dangerousness.” The most Orwellian provision of Cuba’s criminal code, this charge allows authorities to imprison individuals before they have committed a crime, on the suspicion that they might commit one in the future. Their “dangerous” activities included failing to attend pro-government rallies, not belonging to official party organizations, and simply being unemployed.

We published our findings on November 18, 2009.2 It was only then that we received a response from the Cuban government: a public statement, published that day, declaring our report “illegitimate and illegal.”

If the crime of the political prisoners is essentially voicing their opinions, a main function of imprisoning them is to isolate them from their potential audiences. Ramón Velásquez Toranzo taught theater until his political activities cost him his job. In December 2006, he set out on a silent march across the island to call for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners. On the road he was repeatedly threatened and beaten by civilian Rapid Response Brigades, according to his wife and daughter, who accompanied him. He was twice detained and forcibly returned to his home by police. On his third attempt, he was taken to prison and given a three-year sentence for “dangerousness.” Raymundo Perdigón Brito, who had worked as a security guard before he too was fired for “counterrevolutionary” activities, wrote articles critical of the government for foreign websites until, in 2006, he was sentenced to four years in prison for “dangerousness.” Digzan Saavedra Prat, a shoemaker, documented abuse cases for a local human rights group, an activity that cost him his job and caused him to be convicted of “dangerousness” in 2008. His indictment accused him of “being tied to persons of bad moral and social conduct,” “setting a bad example for the new generation,” and “thinking he is handsome.”

Those who continue to speak out while in prison are isolated even further. One man was arrested and sentenced to four years for “dangerousness” after he tried to hand out copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in public in 2006. In 2008, he attempted to commemorate International Human Rights Day (December 10) by reading the Universal Declaration aloud to fellow inmates. But according to his wife, a guard cut him short, ordering him to eat the text—literally. When he refused, he was beaten, thrown into solitary confinement for weeks, and sentenced in a closed-door hearing to six more years in prison for disrespecting authority.

We heard many similar accounts from former prisoners and the relatives of current ones. Those who refused “reeducation” or questioned prison conditions were thrown into solitary confinement cells measuring three by six feet for weeks, even months, on end. Their visits were cut off, phone calls denied, and letters confiscated. Since Cuba has for years refused to grant human rights monitors access to its prisons, it is difficult to get firsthand general accounts of the conditions inside. The most comprehensive—by the sixty-seven-year-old journalist Héctor Maseda Gutierrez, currently serving a twenty-year sentence for his writing—had to be smuggled out of prison virtually page by page. It is titled “Buried Alive.”

While not all dissidents are locked up, nearly all are effectively imprisoned on the island itself. In clear violation of international law, the Cuban government requires its citizens to obtain permission to leave the country, and those marked as “counterrevolutionaries” are generally denied it. The prominent blogger Yoani Sánchez—whose posts comment on the daily indignities of life in Cuba—has three times been refused permission to leave the country, twice to accept international prizes and once, in March 2010, to attend a conference on the Spanish language.

The emergence of a nascent blogosphere has been heralded as a sign that Cuba is opening up, yet the government systematically blocks critical websites and strictly controls access, forcing bloggers to upload their posts using thumb drives and illegal back channels. Because an hour’s use costs roughly one third of Cubans’ monthly wages, and since there are few connections outside of cities, the average Cuban has no access to the Internet. Although Yoani Sánchez was named one of Time magazine’s one hundred most influential people, most Cubans on the island have never even heard of her, let alone read her blog.3

The Cuban government also seeks to isolate dissidents from their communities. They are fired from their jobs and blacklisted from employment. They are subjected to public “acts of repudiation,” in which mobs surround their homes, chant insults, throw stones, and sometimes assault them in plain view of their neighbors. Friends and family members are warned to keep their distance, lest they too be branded counterrevolutionaries and punished. Under the “dangerousness” provision, even spending time with someone who is considered “dangerous” is punishable, a kind of “dangerousness” by association.

“People who come to my house are immediately called by state security and reprimanded,” Eduardo Pacheco Ortíz, a human rights defender and former political prisoner, told us. “Then these people—for fear of losing their jobs, for fear that [the authorities] will take it out on someone in their family—simply stop talking to me.”

After Ramón Velásquez Toranzo was sentenced to four years for his silent march across the island, his son René, who had not marched with his father or considered himself “political,” was fired from his longtime job without explanation, then repeatedly denied work on the grounds that he was not “trustworthy.” Members of the local Revolutionary Defense Committee regularly harassed and threatened him in public. Police warned his friends that they would get in trouble if they kept hanging around him, until he had few friends left. His girlfriend was forbidden by her parents from seeing him. “Some days I wake up and I think: I have nothing. I am nobody. I have no dreams left for my future,” René told us.

Some outside observers contend that the existence of around two hundred political prisoners has little impact on the lives of the 11 million other Cubans. But as the blogger Reinaldo Escobar recently wrote, “Why then does an index finger cross the lips, eyes widen, or a look of horror appear on the faces of my friends when at their houses I commit the indiscretion of making a political comment within earshot of the neighbors?”4 The political prisoners may be small in number, but they are a chilling reminder to all Cubans of what has been a basic fact of life for half a century: to criticize the Castros is to condemn oneself to years of enforced solitude.

In addition to declaring our report illegal, the Cuban government also claimed it was part of a broader effort to “trample” Cuba’s “right to free self-determination and sovereign equality.” This charge, while no more credible than the first, warrants serious attention, for it is reflected in the concerns of García Márquez and many others outside of Cuba who have for years been reluctant to criticize the Castros.

Invoking national sovereignty may be the most common tactic used by governments around the globe—and across the political spectrum—to counter criticism of their abusive practices. It is the international equivalent of the “states’ rights” claim that segregationists in the US South used for years to defend their racist laws and policies. The aim is to shift the focus of public concern from the rights of abuse victims to the rights (real and imagined) of the states that abuse them.

What sets the Castro government apart from most others that employ this tactic is the fact that Cuba has indeed, for five decades, faced an explicit threat to its national sovereignty—coming from the United States, a superpower ninety miles off its shores. In the 1960s, the threat took the form of covert military action, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and multiple botched assassination attempts. It continues in the form of the economic embargo established by President Eisenhower in 1960, later expanded by President Kennedy, and eventually locked in place by the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act. Also known as “Helms-Burton,” the law prohibits the president from lifting trade restrictions until Cuba has legalized political activity and made a commitment to free and fair elections. It also prohibits lifting the embargo as long as Fidel and Raúl Castro remain in office. In other words, it requires that Cubans be free to choose their leaders, but bars them from choosing the Castros. It is thus a program to promote not only democracy but also regime change.

It is hard to think of a US policy with a longer track record of failure. The embargo has caused much hardship to the Cuban people but done nothing to loosen the Castros’ hold on power. Instead it has provided the Cuban government an excuse for the country’s problems. Billboards line the roads outside Havana with slogans like “Eight hours of the blockade is equivalent to the materials required to repair 40 infant care centers.” The excuse is effective because it is at least partly true.

The US policy has also served the Castros as a pretext for repressing legitimate efforts to reform Cuba from within. The most notorious example of the past decade came in response to the Varela Project, a grassroots campaign designed to take advantage of a constitutional provision that allows a national referendum on any reform proposal that receives 10,000 signatures. The organizers spent years holding meetings and gathering signatures, enduring repeated harassment by authorities, attacks, and arrests. In May 2002, they delivered more than 11,000 signatures to the National Assembly.

The response was crushing. Rather than put the referendum to a vote (as required by law), the Castro government countered with its own referendum, which proposed amending the constitution to declare the socialist system “irrevocable.” This referendum passed, according to the government, with 99 percent of the public’s support. Not long afterward, the government began its most aggressive crackdown in years, arresting seventy-five “counterrevolutionaries,” including many Varela Project leaders, and sentencing them to an average of nineteen years in prison.

In a news conference immediately following the crackdown, Cuba’s foreign minister claimed that the Varela Project had been “part of a strategy of subversion against Cuba that has been conceived, financed, and directed from abroad with the active participation of the US Interests Section in Havana.” The United States had indeed been supporting civil society groups in Cuba for decades. In 2002, the year prior to the crackdown, the State Department devoted $5 million to “democracy promotion” in Cuba, channeling it through the US Interests Section in Havana and nongovernmental groups based mostly in Miami. For instance, several Cuban journalists received salaries from US-funded Internet publications critical of the Castro government.

Nonetheless, many of the seventy-five were convicted without any evidence of support—direct or indirect—from the US government. And in those cases where the Cuban government did show they received US support, it provided no credible evidence that the recipients were engaged in activities that would be considered illegal in a democratic country.

According to Cuban court documents, the support took the form of supplying, through the US Interests Section in Havana, equipment like fax machines (“used systematically in sending information to counterrevolutionary cells located in Miami”), books (“all with a pronounced subversive content”), and medicine (“with the explicit purpose of winning over addicts to their cause”). In other cases, the prisoners had been paid by the US for filing articles or radio reports for foreign outlets, or visiting the US Interests Section, where they had “access via the Internet to the websites of enemy publications…[and] counterrevolutionary dailies like the Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald, Agence France-Press, Reuters, and the American television channel CNN.”

Many governments require civil society groups to register funding they receive from foreign states. But for Cubans there is a catch: to register funding from the US government is to admit to a crime punishable with a prison sentence of up to twenty years—even when the funding merely supports activities like human rights monitoring, labor organizing, and establishing independent libraries. In fact, these activities are illegal in Cuba even when pursued without US support. The criminal code explicitly outlaws “actions designed to support, facilitate, or collaborate with the objectives of the ‘Helms-Burton Law.’”

Since promoting democratic rule is a central objective of Helms-Burton, any action taken toward that end can therefore be considered a crime. In this way, just as criticism of the Castros is equated with abetting their enemies, promoting democracy is equated with US-sponsored regime change.

But if the pretext for the crackdown was bogus, it nonetheless served a crucial function: to recast the government’s repression of its citizens as the story of a small nation defending itself against a powerful aggressor. It was the same tactic that Fidel Castro had been employing to brilliant effect for decades. By casting himself as a Latin American David besieged by a US Goliath, he usurped the role of victim from his prisoners. The sleight of hand worked because, for many outside of Cuba, the indignation provoked by the US embargo left little room for the revulsion they would otherwise feel for Fidel Castro’s abuses.

Raúl Castro has adopted this same tactic, so that when outsiders hear of Cuba’s political prisoners, many think first of what the US has done to Cuba, not what Cuba has done to its own people. While the prisons, travel restrictions, and information controls make it difficult for Cuban dissidents to get their stories out to the world, the Castros’ portrayal of Cuba as a victim makes audiences abroad less willing to hear these stories. The effect is to seal Cuba’s prisoners off from international sympathy and reinforce their prolonged solitude.

Once a year, for nearly two decades, the UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the US embargo. In 2009, the resolution passed 187–3, with only Israel and Palau siding with the United States. While this condemnation is deserved, there is no such UN vote to condemn Cuba’s repressive policies, or comparable outrage about its victims.

This discrepancy is particularly pronounced in Latin America, where the long history of heavy-handed interventions and outright coups has left an abiding aversion to US bullying. Even leaders whom one might expect to be sensitive to the prisoners’ plight choose to remain silent. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil was himself imprisoned by a military dictatorship, and former President Michelle Bachelet of Chile is the daughter of a political prisoner (and herself a torture victim). Yet in recent years, both have made state visits to Cuba in which they embraced the Castros and refused to meet with relatives of political prisoners.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of leaders have praised the Castro government as a standard-bearer for the region. President Evo Morales of Bolivia says that Cuba “teaches the entire world how to live with dignity and sovereignty, in its permanent fight against the North American empire.” President Rafael Correa of Ecuador speaks of the “Latin American pride” he feels when witnessing Cuba’s ongoing revolution, which “secured the reestablishment of human rights for all Cuban men and women.” Perhaps the most fervent supporter is President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, whose government has taken over the role, once filled by the Soviet Union, of keeping the Cuban economy afloat by providing millions of barrels of subsidized petroleum. Chávez calls Cuba’s revolution “the mother” of all Latin American liberation movements, and Fidel Castro “the father of the motherland.”

Over the past decade, a growing number of voices in the United States—including editorial boards, research organizations, and advocacy groups—have called for an end to the embargo. But they are far from winning the policy debate in Washington. Anti-Castro hard-liners within the Cuban-American community continue to wield disproportionate influence, even if their dominance has waned in recent years.

The opponents of the embargo have failed to be persuasive. Many have sought to play down the scope of repression in Cuba out of a concern—similar to García Márquez’s—that criticism of the Cuban government will only strengthen the hand of the anti-Castro hard-liners. But by making this strategic choice, they have undermined their credibility among the very people they need to persuade: those who are justifiably concerned about Cuba’s political prisoners. Moreover, they are unable to offer a politically workable solution to members of Congress, who will never vote to end the embargo if this will have no effect on the regime’s abuses.

The embargo must go. But it is naive to think that a government that has systematically repressed virtually all forms of political dissent for decades will cease to do so simply because the embargo has been lifted. Nor is it realistic, given the effectiveness of the Castros’ repressive machinery, to believe that the pressure needed for progress on human rights can come solely from within Cuba. The embargo needs to be replaced with a policy that will bring genuinely effective pressure on the Castro government to improve human rights.

For this to happen, the United States must make the first move. President Obama should approach allies in Europe and Latin America with an offer to lift the US embargo if the other countries agree to join a coalition to press Cuba to meet a single, concrete demand: the release of all political prisoners.

Some governments are sure to rebuff the offer, especially in Latin America. But for many others, the prospect of ending the embargo will remove what has long been the main obstacle to openly condemning the Cuban government’s abuses. And concentrating this multilateral effort exclusively on the issue of political prisoners will make it far more difficult for leaders who say they respect human rights to remain silent.

The new coalition would give the Cuban government a choice: free its political prisoners or face sanctions. Unlike the current US embargo, these sanctions should directly target the Cuban leaders—by denying them travel visas or freezing their overseas assets, for example—without harming the Cuban population as a whole. Ideally this ultimatum alone would suffice to prompt the government to release its prisoners. But even if it did not, the new approach toward Cuba—multilateral, targeted, and focused on human rights rather than regime change—would fundamentally transform the international dynamic that has long helped the Castros stifle dissent. The Cuban government’s efforts to isolate its critics at home would lead to its own isolation from the international community.

In the absence of such a shift, Cubans seeking reform will continue to face daunting odds. Any hope of drawing attention to their cause will require desperate measures, such as the hunger strike recently carried out by Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a dissident who had been in prison since the 2003 crackdown. For eighty-five days, Zapata Tamayo’s protest went largely unnoticed. It was only when he finally starved to death in February—becoming the first Cuban hunger striker to perish in almost forty years—that the world reacted. The European Parliament passed a resolution condemning his death as “avoidable and cruel” and calling for the release of all political prisoners. The Mexican and Chilean legislatures approved similar declarations.

The Cuban government responded in familiar fashion: it blamed the US. The state news organ claimed that Zapata Tamayo had been “thrust into death” by the “powerful machinery of the empire.” When several other dissidents began hunger strikes in the following days—including Guillermo Fariñas, a journalist who at this writing is reportedly near death—Cuban authorities dismissed them as “mercenaries” of the US. Decrying what he called a “huge smear campaign against Cuba,” Raúl Castro told the Cuban Congress, “We will never yield to blackmail from any country.”

Raúl Castro seems confident that he can defuse this latest challenge with the same sleight of hand his brother used so effectively in the past. And indeed, the flurry of condemnation following Zapata Tamayo’s death appears to have already faded. But more than just a tactical move, Raúl’s response reflects a vision for Cuba’s future that does not bode well for those desiring change. It is the vision he set forth on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in 2009, addressing the nation from the same public square where Fidel had first proclaimed victory:

Today, the Revolution is stronger than ever…. Does it mean the danger has diminished? No, let’s not entertain any illusions. As we commemorate this half-century of victories, it is time to reflect on the future, on the next fifty years, when we shall continue to struggle incessantly.

A story of struggle always needs an adversary, just as a claim to victimhood needs an aggressor. After playing this role for fifty years, the United States is now in a unique position to bring about change in Cuba: when it stops acting like Goliath, the Castro government will stop looking like David. Only then will Cuba’s dissidents be able to rally the international support they need to end their long years of solitude.

—April 28, 2010

Notas:

1. The research trip was carried out by Nik Steinberg and a Latin American human rights lawyer who preferred to remain anoymous. ↩
2. Human Rights Watch, "New Castro, Same Cuba: Political Prisoners in the Post-Fidel Era." ↩
3. Time magazine has also named Sánchez's blog, Generation Y, one of the twenty-five best in the world; it can be read at www.desdecuba.com/generationy.↩
4. Escobar's blog, Desde Aqui (From Here), can be read at www.desdecuba.com/reinaldoescobar.↩