Och för en utomstående betraktare är Kuba givetvis öppnare än Stalins och Maos skräckvälden. Men Kuba är en diktatur, och många förföljs och fänglsas ogrundat - men därtill förekommer även tortyr och arbetsläger, precis som i de historiska kommunistländerna.
Frontpage Magazine skriver här om Kubas egna "Gulag-läger" på Isla de Pinos. Här satt en gång Fidel Castro själv fängslad i Presidio Modelo, mellan 1953 och 1955 av dåvarande Batista-regimen. Efter revolutionen gjordes fängelset om till en straffort för kontra-revolutionärer.
I sin bok från 1985, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag, beskriver den kubanske människorättsaktivisten Armando Valladares tillvaron som fånge. Frontpage Magazine skriver:
Valladares recounts how prisoners were beaten with bayonets, electric cables, and truncheons. He tells how he and other prisoners were forced to take “baths” in human feces and urine.[ii]
Typical of the horror in Castro’s Gulag was the experience of Roberto López Chávez, one of Valladares’s prison friends. When López went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses in the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink. The guards then urinated in his mouth. He died the next day.
Man skriver också om Castro-regimens historia av tortyr mot amerikaner:
During the Vietnam War, Castro sent some of his henchmen to run the “Cuban Program” at the Cu Loc POW camp in Hanoi, which became known as “the Zoo.” Its primary objective was to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human being could withstand. The Cubans selected American POWs as their guinea pigs. A Cuban nicknamed “Fidel,” the main torturer at the Zoo, initiated his own personal reign of terror.[vi]
En amerikansk krigsfånge beskriver sedan "Fidels" tortyr av en vän, som följande:
The man [Cobeil] could barely walk; he shuffled slowly, painfully. His clothes were torn to shreds. He was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, and a dirty, yellowish black and purple from head to toe. The man’s head was down; he made no attempt to look at anyone. . . . He stood unmoving, his head down. Fidel smashed a fist into the man’s face, driving him against the wall. Then he was brought to the center of the room and made to get down onto his knees. Screaming in rage, Fidel took a length of black rubber hose from a guard and lashed it as hard as he could into the man’s face. The prisoner did not react; he did not cry out or even blink an eye. His failure to react seemed to fuel Fidel’s rage and again he whipped the rubber hose across the man’s face. . . . Again and again and again, a dozen times, Fidel smashed the man’s face with the hose. Not once did the fearsome abuse elicit the slightest response from the prisoner. . . . His body was ripped and torn everywhere; hell cuffs appeared almost to have severed the wrists, strap marks still wound around the arms all the way to the shoulders, slivers of bamboo were embedded in the bloodied shins and there were what appeared to be tread marks from the hose across the chest, back, and legs.[viii]
Fången avled senare som följd av tortyren.
Frontpage Magazine ger fler exempel och konstaterar sedan att det Castro-regimen lät göra mot amerikanska fångar i Vietnam, gjorde man även mot sitt eget folk hemma på Kuba. Man konstaterar sedan kritiskt att den kubanska regimen som under flera år hölls under armarna av Sovjetunionen nu får sin livslängd förlängd av president Obama.
Här skriver också Washington Posts redaktion om Kubas diktaturfasoner.
Alla är dock inte lika kritiska. Här gör journalisten Llewellyn King i Huffington Post en jämförelse mellan just Kuba och Vietnam och konstaterar att dagens Vietnam, trots kommunismen, är ett mycket öppnare samhälle än Kuba - och att Vietnam gått framåt på ett sätt Kuba inte gjort, även om den politiska förföljelsen fortfarande är utbredd.
Att Vietnam öppnats beror dock just på handel och på den sedan 20 år tillbaka normaliserade relationen med USA. Det skiljer också Vietnam från Kuba:
Business is very important in "Communist" Vietnam.
By stark contrast Cuba has a subculture of tiny businesses, mostly restaurants, that are constantly harassed by government agents. In Vietnam business is celebrated. There are multi-millionaires in Vietnam. Not so Cuba.
Han konstaterar sedan att ett öppnande av relationen också till Kuba kommer att göra att det landet också öppnar sig, precis som Vietnam gjort:
I can tell you that things are better in Vietnam because of normalization of relations with the United States, and worse in Cuba because that has not happened.
To have open relations with China and to rue those with Vietnam, and to want to keep Cuba in limbo is incoherent and self-defeating.
Den mycket viktiga debatten fortgår således.
Källor: Frontpage Magazine, Huffington Post
Se även tidigare inlägg:
Kubas tillslag mot dissidenter väcker kritik mot Obamas öppnade dörr mot diktaturen 20150101
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