Oscar Biscet: One Year Later
by Myles Kantor
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 24, 2003
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11466

Dreams are hazardous in brutal lands.

Former Czech dissident and president Vaclav Havel has observed:

…communism [in Eastern Europe] was far from being simply the dictatorship of one group of people over another. It was a genuinely totalitarian system—that is, it penetrated every aspect of life and deformed everything it touched, including all the natural ways people had developed of living together.

This is a good description of Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s regime has deformed and suffocated national life for what will be 45 years next month.

Italians can criticize Silvio Berluconi; Englishmen can criticize Tony Blair; Argentines can criticize Nestor Kichner; Americans can criticize George W. Bush. They can establish organizations and assemble to protest their polices; they can publish articles and books and make broadcasts advocating different ideas. If these citizens find their governments intolerable, they can move to another country.

Cubans have none of these rights. It is a crime to criticize Fidel Castro and his functionaries, a crime to criticize communism, and a crime to leave Cuba without permission.  

As over 150 left-wing writers noted in a December 4 letter to The New York Times, the Castro regime “does not trust the Cuban people to distinguish truth from falsehood, fact from disinformation.” Savage cowardice is the essence of this system. 

On December 6 last year, Dr. Oscar Biscet went to a home in Havana to discuss human rights violations in Cuba with other people of conscience. He hoped to establish such “Friends of Human Rights” clubs throughout Cuba and promote civil society.

A month before the December 6 meeting, Biscet held a press conference on abuse of Cuban prisoners. He has terrible knowledge of this subject, having been a prisoner of conscience from November 3, 1999 until October 31, 2002. He suffered over twenty detentions before the November arrest.

Biscet was arrested again on December 6 and sentenced in April to 25 years as part of a mass imprisonment of human rights activists. First sent to the maximum security Kilo 5 ½ prison, he was transferred last month to Kilo 8 prison for protesting mistreatment of a prisoner’s family and put in a punishment cell with a violent prisoner. He was put in solitary confinement this month for not acknowledging prison guards and officials during a count.    

“Remember that never will I betray a just cause: that of human rights,” Biscet wrote in a June letter. “My inspiration is alive: God and the great teachers of non-violence, present today more than ever.”

Biscet has seen crimes and suffered crimes in prison, but he has not broken.

In his epistle to Titus, the apostle Paul refers to people “zealous of good works” and others “living in malice,” a pair of phrases which characterize Biscet and his persecutors. For what is tyranny but malice perpetrated on a massive level?

“When I was arrested, I felt liberated. I felt free,” Congressman John Lewis says of his resistance to segregation as a young man. “Never again would I obey segregated customs, regulations, or laws.” 

Castro’s thugs control and abuse Oscar Biscet’s body, but his dreams of justice and peace endure. In the profoundest sense, he is free.

Myles Kantor is a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com and editor-at-large for Pureplay Press, which publishes books about Cuban history and culture. His e-mail address is MylesColumn@aol.com.