[Mb-civic] 9, 240 victims, and counting - Jeff Jacoby - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  9,240 victims, and counting

By Jeff Jacoby  |  January 4, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

THE LONGEST-RULING despot in the world is Fidel Castro, who seized power 
in Cuba 47 years ago this week. Like most dictators, Castro is a brazen 
liar, especially about his own regime. This, for example, is what he 
told an international conference in Havana in April 2001:

''There have never been death squads in our country, nor a single 
missing person, nor a single political assassination, nor a single 
victim of torture. . . . You may travel around the country, ask the 
people, look for a single piece of evidence, try to find a single case 
where the Revolutionary government has ordered or tolerated such an 
action. And if you find them, then I will never speak in public again."

One would have to be willfully blind -- a useful idiot, in Lenin's 
phrase -- to believe such a reeking falsehood. But when it comes to 
Castro, useful idiots have never been in short supply. From Norman 
Mailer to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Jesse Jackson to Ted Turner, a long 
line of admirers has swooned over the bearded tyrant, lavishly praising 
his wisdom and charm -- and never showing the slightest interest in his 
real record: cruelty, repression, and a death toll in the tens of thousands.

But Castro's mocking challenge -- ''try to find a single case" -- is not 
going unanswered. The Cuba Archive project (www.CubaArchive.org) is 
working to document the cost, in human life, of more than five decades 
of Cuban dictatorship. The New Jersey-based archive's tiny staff has set 
itself the monumental task of identifying every man, woman, and child 
killed by Cuba's rulers since March 10, 1952, the day Batista ousted the 
island's last democratically elected president. Meticulously, 
impartially, the archive's researchers are assembling the evidence that 
Castro claims doesn't exist -- victim by victim, one death at a time.

It is heartbreaking work. The revolution's victims have died in front of 
firing squads and been beaten to death by government goons; they have 
been sunk while at sea and shot down while flying; they have been killed 
for resisting communism at home and killed when sent to fight for 
communism abroad. In the hands of Castro's jailers, some have been 
driven to suicide; many more have disappeared.

It is also slow and painstaking work. Each death entered into the 
archive must be confirmed by at least two independent sources and 
documented, to the extent possible, with photographs, eyewitness 
testimony, and the recollections of survivors. ''We don't want to just 
record names and numbers," says Maria Werlau, the president of the Cuba 
Archive. ''We want to tell each story. We want the world to know the 
magnitude of the Cuban tragedy."

So far the archive has catalogued the deaths of 9,240 victims of the 
Castro regime. Who were they? Sister Aida Rosa Perez, who was sent to 
prison as an ''enemy of the revolution" and died of heart failure 
brought on by torture and hard labor. Estanislao Gonzalez Quintana, who 
died in police custody four days after being detained for ''unlawful 
economic activity"; his corpse was visibly bruised and had a deep gash 
in the forehead. The three Garcia-Marin Thompson brothers, who sought 
asylum at the Vatican embassy in Havana, only to be seized by Interior 
Ministry troops and executed after a summary hearing. Mrs. Alberto Lazo 
Pastrana, who died with her three children when the boat on which they 
were trying to leave Cuba was sunk by the Cuban navy; the mother was 
eaten by sharks and the children were never seen again. Carlos Alberto 
Costa, a 29-year-old American, who was shot down by a Cuban jet fighter 
as he flew an unarmed plane on a search-and-rescue mission over 
international waters in 1996.

Plus 9,230 others.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Werlau and the archive's 
research director, Armando Lago, an economist who has spent years 
analyzing the costs of the Cuban revolution, expect the total number of 
deaths to be far higher. As many as 77,000 Cubans may have lost their 
lives trying to escape the island; their deaths, too, will eventually be 
added to the archive.

Werlau, who lived in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, saw 
firsthand how international awareness of human rights atrocities helped 
Chile reinstate its democracy. ''The Castro regime executed more people 
in just its first three years than the Pinochet regime killed or 
'disappeared' in its entire 17 years in power," she says. ''Yet Castro's 
victims, who number so many times more -- and who include not just 
political opponents but entire families assassinated for trying to flee 
-- remain unknown, ignored, or forgotten.

''We just had to do something about it."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/01/04/9240_victims_and_counting/
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