Cuban dissident leaders prepare for rare mass meeting

HAVANA: Former political prisoner Martha Beatriz Roque supervised workers smoothing out cement in the backyard where hundreds of people are invited next week to a rare mass meeting of dissidents in communist Cuba. There, near a huge tree dripping with large tropical fruit called zapotes, Roque and other leaders will sit in fellow dissident Felix Bonne’s backyard and discuss democracy. To the side of the 1,500-square metre garden, a small concrete slab was poured for the international news media. Men’s and women’s restrooms are being built around the corner with some of the US$25,000 (euro19,680) in donations Roque said have come in from exile groups in south Florida — far less than the US$130,000 (euro102,000) budgeted.

Three years in the planning and now just days away, it remains unclear how successful the first general meeting of the Assembly for the Promotion of Civil Society in Cuba will be — or whether Fidel Castro’s government will even let it happen. The aim of the May 20 meeting is to join several hundred diverse opposition groups from on and off the island — including human rights organisations, outlawed political parties and independent journalists — for talks about peaceful action to create a democratic society. “It’s a point of departure,” Roque said. Although it has been promoted in Miami’s exile community, few Cubans on the island have heard about the planned gathering. Communist leaders disparage the event, claiming it is financed by Washington — a charge organisers deny.

Castro last month told international journalists that they “artificially inflate” the island’s opposition. Underscoring deep divisions in the opposition, some dissidents say they won’t go. Relatives of several dozen political prisoners call the meeting a provocation that could spark new arrests. “The bellicose line of confrontation doesn’t get us anywhere,” said Beatriz del Carmen Pedroso, whose husband was among 75 dissidents arrested in a March 2003 crackdown. Roque was another of the 75, but she was among 14 dissidents since released on medical parole. “The assembly isn’t provoking the government,” she said. “This meeting is a right of civil society.” Roque has frequent contacts with officials at the US Interests Section, the American mission here. Earlier this year, the assembly’s executive council, which includes Roque, criticised Castro and praised US President George W Bush in a conference call from inside the mission to a US congressional committee in Washington.

With American officials, “we have the same relation that the country’s other dissidents have — to converse, to go when they invite us,” Roque said. “But you’re not going to find anything here that has been obtained through the Interests Section,” she said of Bonne’s home. US officials are invited to the assembly, she said, along with diplomats from other countries. Conspicuously absent will be Oswaldo Paya, one of Cuba’s best-known dissidents and the organiser of the Varela Project, a pro-democracy effort promoted by former US President Jimmy Carter during his May 2002 visit. Unlike leaders of the assembly, he now shuns meetings with the Americans. Paya has said he initially was invited to attend next week’s meeting, but resents assembly organisers’ efforts to “sabotage” his competing National Dialogue project joining small groups of people to discuss Cuba’s future.
Meanwhile, some of Miami’s best known exile groups support the meeting, including the Brigade 2506 Bay of Pigs Veterans Association.

The Cuban American National Foundation, an influential political lobby, even broke a long-standing policy against travel to Cuba and told members they could attend. But communist authorities haven’t indicated whether they will allow in members of the group, known here as the “terrorist mafia.” Roque said Cuban dissidents have learned much since attempting a similar gathering nine years ago under the now-defunct opposition group Concilio Cubano. Concilio’s 1996 meeting was cancelled after about 50 members were rounded up beforehand, and on the day the convention was to be held, Cuban MiGs off the island’s coast shot down two American civilian planes carrying four members of the exile group Brothers to the Rescue, plunging the countries into political crisis.

Roque won’t rule out a similar round-up this time. Scores of dissidents have summons to appear at police stations on the meeting date, and those on Cuba’s Isle of Youth have been told they cannot travel to the assembly, Roque said. But she said the government couldn’t force a cancellation of the meeting without arresting all three executive council members, which would carry a high political cost. “We have arrived at the highest point dissident activity has reached in Cuba,” she said.