Chronicle on Cuba - May 2006

Exile Community

May 3: Sylvia Iriondo, president of the exile group Mothers and Women Against Repression and for Cuba, said in Brussels that "the European Union policy of dialogue with Cuba has been a great failure, since it has only served to strengthen the Castro regime and continue the repression." "The more the measures are eased, the more the repression increases in Cuba," Iriondo said. Iriondo, who visited the European Parliament at the invitation of Transnational Radical Party Eurodeputy Marco Panella, was accompanied by Angel de Fana, a former political prisoner, Manuel Vazquez Portal, one of the 75 dissidents jailed in the spring of 2003, and Blanca Gonzalez, the mother of jailed journalist Normando Hernandez. (EFE, 3/5/06)

May 9: More than a labor of love, new movie "The Lost City" was a labor of life for Cuban-born actor Andy Garcia. Garcia, 50, directed, produced, scored and starred in the film about pre-communist Cuba that begins playing in theaters around the United States after a limited run in Los Angeles, New York and Miami. The actor, whose movies include "Ocean's Eleven" and "Ocean's Twelve," labored 18 years to raise money and make "Lost City," but he said the seeds of his story go back to when he was 5-1/2 and fled the country and the communist regime under leader Fidel Castro. Garcia’s greatest achievement, he said, is that a movie about Cuba and its people exists at all. "There was a story waiting to be told," he said. (Reuters, 9/5/06)

May 12: Cuban exile groups and energy experts deemed as impossible and politically-motivated bills submitted to the US Congress that would allow American companies to negotiate a partnership with Cuba for joint oil exploration of its coasts. Alfredo Mesa, Executive Director of the Cuban-American National Foundation, denounced the bills, claiming that "their only interest in Cuba is economic." “They are not concerned about the abuse of human rights in Cuba," he explained. The initiatives were sponsored by the Republican legislators Jeff Flake and Larry Craig. (AP, 15/5/06)

May 16: Young Cuban Americans gathered around a telephone at Princeton University in April to hear Rolando Rodriguez Lobaina talk fervently from his home in Cuba, about growing discontent among the island's youths and their yearning for freedom. Three days later, Cuban authorities arrested the dissident leader. They held him until May 12. Rodriguez was released after Raices de Esperanza, the Cuban-American youth group that he addressed at Princeton, mounted an international campaign to denounce the Cuban government for oppressing political discourse and to demand that he be freed from prison. Rodriguez, director of the Center for Alternative Studies for the Cuban Youth Movement for Democracy, delivered an impassioned speech to Raices in a conference call with his brother, Nestor, in late April. "Freedom of expression, freedom of association, free access to sources of information, the right to investigate, to doubt, that is simply enough to motivate our struggle," Rodriguez told about 100 Raices members. (The Miami Herald, 17/5/06)

May 27: Cuba's daily newspaper Granma observed the passing of Dr. Eduardo Bernabé Ordaz, chronicling his climb from shoeshine boy to guerrilla fighter and then head of the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana for some 40 years. The obituary, however, omitted mention of allegations that political dissidents were given electroshocks as a form of torture at Ordaz's hospital, better known as Mazorra. ''He was a tool in the bloody machine to destroy people's minds,'' said former political prisoner Jorge Alejandro Ferrer, 60, of Southwest Dade. "I was tortured in this place where they were supposed to cure people. My life was destroyed in that place.'' In published reports over the years, Ordaz acknowledged holding dissidents but for legitimate reasons. But Armando Lago, co-author of the 1991 book, “The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba”, said Ordaz had signed an agreement with Cuba's State Security department giving it control over ''punishment pavilions'' at Mazorra. 'Dissidents held there would get electroshock between their legs. When the families came to complain, he'd say, `I have no control over what goes on over there,' '' Lago said. Witnesses, including Ferrer, said Ordaz also used patients as household help. Although there was no proven therapeutic value to the hospital orchestra or sports teams, life for the true mental patients was probably pleasant, Lago said. The torture, he alleged, was reserved for the 5 percent of patients who were political dissidents. (The Miami Herald, 27/5/06)