Chronicle on Cuba - March 2007

Exile Community

March 1: US President George W. Bush mourned the recent death of Mario Chanes de Armas, who was at Fidel Castro's side in the Cuban revolution and later spent decades as a political prisoner in the leader's jails. ``Cuban patriot Mario Chanes de Armas was a political prisoner of the Castro regime for 30 years, one of the longest sentences of any political prisoner in the world,'' Bush said in a statement. ``Like so many Cubans, he sought a democratic Cuban society only to see his quest betrayed by a Castro dictatorship.'' ``Mario Chanes was one of the original plantados, Cuban political prisoners who were unyielding in their fervent desire for a free Cuba,'' Bush said. ``His patriotism and strong sense of purpose are examples to all freedom-loving people. Laura joins me in sending our thoughts and prayers to his family and friends.'' (The Guardian, 2/3/07)

March 6: The executive director of the “Cuba Archive” project, Maria Werlau, presented in Madrid the first entries of a database aimed at documenting the numerous casualties of Cuba’s revolutionary process since 1959, which - she argues - tally up to 8,190 cases. During a press conference in Spain, Werlau, accompanied by Antonio Guedes, president of the Ibero-American Association for Liberty, announced the “Cuba Archive” project and urged the media “to break the silence in the name of the Cuban victims.” (EFE, 7/3/07)

March 8: Agustín Tamargo, the gravelly voiced, fast-talking Spanish-language commentator known for his passionate and insightful analyses of local politics, Cuba and Fidel Castro, died. ''Cuba died last night,'' Eduardo González Rubio, a radio colleague, said. Tamargo was 82. He never realized his dream to return to Cuba, ''open a little schoolhouse and just teach,'' as one listener remarked on Radio Mambí 710-AM, where Tamargo had his own show for more than two decades. Tamargo fought throat cancer for several years. He recently fell ill for the sixth time with pneumonia and died of a heart attack at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach. Cuban American National Foundation President Francisco ''Pepe'' Hernández called Tamargo's death ``an irreparable loss (…) at this historic crossroads that we find ourselves when we really needed a figure like him that represented honesty and integrity.'' A respected journalist in Cuba, Tamargo wrote for the weekly Bohemia magazine before he left in 1960 to escape what he called ``the scourge of communism.''  When Castro began to strangle civil liberties, Tamargo balked. ''You don't want journalists, what you need is record players,'' Tamargo wrote in a column before he left Cuba. (The Miami Herald, 9/3/07)

March 19: People chuckled when presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a Mormon raised in Michigan and elected in Massachusetts, bungled the names of Cuban-American politicians during a recent speech in Miami. But when he mistakenly associated Fidel Castro's trademark speech-ending slogan – “Patria o muerte, venceremos” -- with a free Cuba, listeners didn't laugh. They winced. Castro has closed his speeches with the phrase -- in English, ''Fatherland or death, we shall overcome'' -- for decades. ''Clearly, that's something he was ill-advised on or didn't do his homework on,'' said Hialeah City Council President Esteban Bovo. ``When you get cute with slogans, you get yourself into a trap.'' Romney's fumble demonstrates the potential snags for state and national politicians trying to navigate the Cuban-American community of South Florida. (AP, 19/3/07)

March 21: Republican presidential candidate John McCain warned against the spread of socialism in Latin America and pledged to give the region renewed US attention if elected. Appearing in Little Havana, McCain carefully avoided criticism of President Bush but said the Iraq war "has diverted attention from our hemisphere, and we have paid a penalty for that" in the form of a growing leftism embodied by leaders Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. In a speech to veterans of the ill-fated, CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Arizona senator said that "everyone should understand the connections" between Chavez, Morales and communist Cuban President Fidel Castro. "They inspire each other. They assist each other. They get ideas from each other," McCain said. "It's very disturbing." McCain had a clearly receptive audience among the Bay of Pigs veterans, who consider him a hero for the years he spent as a prisoner of war in what was then communist North Vietnam. The group's president, former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, noted McCain's years in captivity in his introduction and said: "It's a distinct honor to have you." McCain was presented with a copy of the book “Against All Hope” by former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares, who was frequently tortured during his 22 years in a Cuban prison. McCain said that while he was in Hanoi, a Cuban agent came to show his Vietnamese captors "some new interrogation techniques," and he later discovered that the same agent had tortured Valladares. "Anything that I and my friends might have experienced is nothing -- nothing -- compared with what the men in this room went through," McCain said. (The Miami Herald, 23/3/07)

March 22: On an October night outside the Bolivian city of Vallegrande, Gustavo Villoldo says he secretly buried the body of iconic revolutionary leader Ernesto ''Che'' Guevara along with two fellow rebels. The year was 1967. That night, he says he snipped a lock of Che's hair and scribbled down the exact geographical coordinates before dropping the bodies into a common grave. Now, Villoldo -- a Miami Cuban exile hired 40 years ago through the CIA to hunt down Che -- has come forward for the first time with his evidence to claim that Che's remains may still be in Bolivian soil and not in a Cuban mausoleum, his official grave site -- as Fidel Castro claims. He contends that hundreds of thousands who make pilgrimages yearly to Che's tomb in Santa Clara are being hoodwinked by the Cuban government. Villoldo said he's one of only four men who were present when Che's body was buried and is positive that he is the only one who knows the grave site's coordinates -- and can settle the matter once and for all. Villoldo says he's not coming forward for money but wants the truth known about Che's remains.  Cuban officials have not commented, but Bolivian government officials and Argentine scientists who took part in the dig have been on the defensive. Villoldo knows his story may spark anger from Che lovers and haters alike. But he wants Che's family to know where their loved one is buried. ''I will give them the coordinates, but only to them, not Castro,'' he said. ``It's only right, I think.'' (The Miami Herald, 23/3/07)

March 24: A small crowd of mostly Cuban exiles gathered on a sidewalk on Flagler Street to express frustration with the Bush administration's restrictions on traveling to the communist island to visit family. The protest is part of a stepped-up effort to ease the restrictions after federal lawmakers in Washington filed legislation that would allow Cuban-Americans to visit the island at will and lift a general Cuba travel ban for all American citizens. Demonstrators carried signs and chanted slogans against the rules that limit family visits to once every three years, with no humanitarian exceptions for family emergencies. The measures also do not include aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and cousins on the list that qualifies as family. One of the groups involved in organizing the demonstration, the Association of Christian Women in Defense of the Family, said in a statement that ''now, more than ever, is the time to act'' because Congress is considering bills to ease travel restrictions. (The Miami Herald, 24/3/07)

March 31: The US travel ban to Cuba incites passions at both ends of South Florida's political spectrum. But having US Representative Jeff Flake, who hard-line exiles consider an adversary, sitting on a stage in the heart of Little Havana marked a first. Flake, a libertarian Republican from Arizona who has traveled to Cuba four times and has pushed Congress for years to end the travel ban, took part in a debate over the travel ban at the Tower Theater. He sought to make a case that banning travel to the communist island is counterproductive and against America's democratic ideals. Florida International University professor and Cuba scholar Lisandro Pérez echoed the argument, asking what had four decades of a trade embargo accomplished. Two prominent Cuban Americans -- radio host and University of Miami professor Paul Crespo and Hialeah City Council President Esteban Bovo -- countered that opening Cuba to American tourists and allowing Cuban Americans to visit family on the island more often than once every three years would only strengthen Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl's control. The debate, hosted by the American Civil Liberties Union, foreshadowed what could be a battle in the Democrat-controlled Congress over proposed legislation to ease restrictions. (The Miami Herald, 1/4/07)