Actions Provoke Regime’s Wrath : Rare Dissident Challenges Cuba Over Human Rights

Of all the places to interview Ricardo Bofill, a dissident who confronts the government of Cuba on human rights abuses, his apartment on the outskirts of Havana might seem the least likely.

The apartment is one floor above the residence of the local representative of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, the Cuban government’s grass-roots vigilance network. Defense committees are on the lookout for people like Bofill, people who receive strange visitors, who print criticisms of the government, who might engage in what are called attempts against the state.

The vigilantes usually report such activity to the police. But Bofill, 47, gaunt and bespectacled, talked with reporters in his apartment anyway.

In Cuba, his is a rare voice. His protests over arbitrary arrests, mistreatment of prisoners, restrictions on travel and limits on publications and the press are almost unheard of in Cuba’s tightly controlled society.

While he was being interviewed the other day, members of the Defense Committee sat rocking quietly on the patio below.

“If you publish all this and the government doesn’t detain us,” he said, “that would be a symptom of change. These conversations (with reporters) are a thermometer to measure whether there is an improvement.”

Bofill heads the independent and illegal Cuban Human Rights Committee, the country’s only such organization. His committee says it has an extensive underground network of former political prisoners and their families, people who keep the committee informed on political arrests and abuse of prison inmates.

If nothing else, the committee has succeeded in putting the government of Fidel Castro on the defensive in connection with human rights conditions in Cuba.

“We did not pay attention to this problem,” Omar Mendoza, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said. “We are learning to defend ourselves better.”

Bofill’s committee also has provoked the government’s wrath. Bofill has been jailed twice in the past decade. Last September, Elizardo Sanchez, another committee member, was sent to jail after being interviewed by two foreign reporters. The reporters were expelled; Sanchez was freed in May.

Bofill contends that no one should be persecuted for speaking out.

“We are not conspirators,” he said. “What we do, we do in the open. If the government of Cuba does not like the denunciations, the solution is to stop taking actions that lead to denunciations.”

Successive crackdowns on the Human Rights Committee have attracted the attention of international human rights groups and of President Reagan, whom the Cuban government considers its No. 1 foreign adversary.

In June, Bofill received a letter of encouragement from Reagan in which the President assured Bofill that the United States will continue to press for international investigations of human rights conditions in Cuba. Last spring, the U.S. government tried and failed to persuade the United Nations to investigate human rights in Cuba.

“As more facts become available to more persons, we expect increased support,” Reagan said in the letter, which Bofill showed to reporters. “This should bring hope to the thousands of men and women cruelly and unjustifiably imprisoned in Cuba.”

In Washington, a high-ranking U.S. official confirmed that Reagan had sent a letter to Bofill, but he would not disclose its contents.

Bofill thinks that publicizing Reagan’s letter may upset the Cuban government, but he defends his right to communicate with U.S. officials. He points out that Cuban officials do the same.

“Why can’t we converse with the United States?” he said. “Why? This is a theme the Cuban government uses to attack us.”

The Cuban government has tried to minimize the impact of Bofill’s committee.

“The organization is made up of no more than Bofill and maybe three other people,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mendoza said. “This is not a respected organization and it has no credibility. If you go on the street and ask people, no one, not a one, knows of it.”

Mendoza said that Bofill would not be prosecuted for speaking to foreign journalists.

“Bofill is the best example that in Cuba, human rights are respected,” he said.

It is difficult to pin down the precise extent of human rights abuse in Cuba. It is in part a question of definition. Cuba defines political crimes narrowly and contends that political prisoners are jailed for sabotage, working for foreign intelligence services or for upsetting public order.

According to Mendoza, there are fewer than 800 persons in Cuban prisons for such offenses.

Bofill’s committee puts the number in the thousands and counts among them Cubans jailed for such offenses as spreading enemy propaganda, trying to flee the island by raft or boat, practicing religion or, as he does, airing complaints.

The U.S. government estimates that there are 15,000 political prisoners in Cuba.

Bofill gauges the results of his human rights work by “shadings” that he says indicate improvements in human rights in Cuba: the freeing of some political prisoners this year, the cancellation of some death sentences, the release of committee members from jail.

His committee is pressing for abolition of the death penalty and for independence for the judicial system. Bofill would also like to see it made possible for Cubans to leave the island and return routinely, a privilege now extended on a case-by-case basis.

He emphasized that he does not want to become an exile and follow more than a million other Cubans who have left the island during the nearly 29 years of Castro’s rule.

“I cannot renounce my right to leave Cuba,” he said. “I do not accept exile.”

Last August, Bofill entered the French Embassy in Havana and refused to leave until he was assured that the police would not arrest him. He said he was not seeking asylum, only visiting.

Bofill said he left the embassy after an emissary from French President Francois Mitterrand secured a guarantee of freedom from Fidel Castro. Officials in the French Embassy declined to comment on the incident.

Eastern Inspiration

Bofill said his group was inspired not by Western human rights groups but by dissident movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Cuban campaign, he insisted, seeks to reform, not overthrow the Communist government.

“No one is talking about rebellion,” he said. “We don’t insist on political models or alternatives. We advise that democratic reforms are indispensable to guarantee a major level of respect for essential rights.”

He pointedly criticized U.S. policy toward Cuba.

“I want the U.S. to change its immigration policy toward Cuba,” he said. “I want any kind of aggression by the U.S. stopped, and any threats by the United States against Cuba” (also stopped).

Relations between the United States and Cuba are cool. Three years ago, Cuba broke off an agreement with the United States that would have allowed 20,000 Cubans to emigrate yearly in exchange for Cuban acceptance of the return of Cuban criminals who were sent to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boat lift.

Bofill is a high-strung man who seems resigned to pay a high price for his activities.

“We don’t know how long the Cuban government will tolerate us,” he said. “I would say there is a death penalty hanging over our heads.”

Bofill’s parents died when he was in jail. His wife and son took refuge in Miami eight years ago. These losses, coupled with being stripped of his means of livelihood, have in some ways made Bofill more defiant.

“If my family was here and my parents still alive, it is evident that life would be more difficult,” he said. “When we lose our family members, that’s when our hands become much freer to do everything. I have no one here and, materially, I am virtually without anything. No job, nothing to live off.”

He said he feeds himself through the generosity of friends abroad and in Cuba.

“I have been in prison and I am accustomed to live with a little piece of bread, with much frugality,” he said.

Bofill has been at odds with the Cuban government on a variety of subjects for a long time. In the 1960s, he joined a group of intellectuals who criticized government economic policies. He subsequently lost his job as a professor of Marxist philosophy at Havana University and served his first term in jail.

In 1976, Bofill began to lobby quietly on behalf of Cuban political prisoners. In 1980, he began to publicize his complaints abroad and served two more prison terms for his efforts. In all, he has spent 10 of the past 20 years in various Cuban prisons.

“We tried to handle these problems inside the country, without looking for publicity outside,” he said. “However tired we were of not being paid attention to and persuaded that Cuba only listened to outsiders, we decided to carry on like this.

“We don’t pretend to be heroes. There is something in all this that comes from within. A certain desire to do good for other people, a certain altruism. But also we look at our efforts as defense of the structure of Cuban law.”