Uneasy Freedom May Be Temporary : A Few Dissidents Speak Out in Totalitarian Cuba

Gustavo Arcos and Fidel Castro were as close as two 26-year-old student revolutionaries could be when they rode together into the first disastrous battle of the Cuban revolution 35 years ago.

Castro drove the car, a new Buick, and Arcos sat behind him with an eight-shot pistol, pitifully underarmed for an assault on the fortified Moncada military barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The attack, on July 26, 1953, was a bloody failure, but it marked the beginning of the Cuban revolution.

Castro emerged from the barracks fiasco unscathed and went on to secure a firmer place in the driver’s seat than any leader in Cuban history.

Arcos emerged from the battle with grave wounds, a lifelong limp and, after a brief period as a diplomat and hero of the revolution, an enduring place in the back seat of Cuban society as a two-time inmate of the prison system run by his old comrade-in-arms.

He was jailed the first time, he said, after falling out with Castro in 1965 while serving as Cuban ambassador to Belgium.

“I traveled in Western and Eastern Europe, and I had a problem of conscience seeing those Communist countries and comparing them to the democratic countries of the West,” Arcos explained in a recent interview at the suburban Havana home he shares with his brother, Sebastian.

Today, Arcos, ailing and 61, is joined by about 200 other former political prisoners, including Sebastian, 57, a dentist, in taking advantage of an unexpected period of relative freedom to raise the only openly dissident voices in an otherwise rigidly totalitarian country. Their freedom to protest is uneasy and probably temporary, Arcos and his brother said in the interview.

“Fidel always said he doesn’t have little enemies, only big ones,” said Arcos, a practicing Catholic and professed anti-Communist who was released from his second long stretch in prison in March. “Even if you are an old and sick man, he considers you a dangerous man.”

For the moment, however, they are out of jail and free to move around, albeit under close surveillance, as the result of a recent series of Cuban government moves to burnish its human rights image.

International Pressure

Bowing to heavy international pressure and timing the move to coincide with the March meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, the Castro government released hundreds of political prisoners earlier this year. It permitted several human rights delegations, including the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Assn. of the Bar of the City of New York, to visit prisons and talk to inmates and ex-prisoners.

Even more important in terms of international pressure on the Castro regime will be the visit, on Sept. 18, of an official delegation of the U.N. human rights body to investigate longstanding and current charges of abuses.

At the same time, the recently revived Cuban-American immigration agreement of 1984 opened the door last spring for a large number of former political prisoners to leave, most of them for the United States.

The U.S. Interests Section, which operates in the absence of an embassy here, said 1,500 former inmates and members of their families have left since May. It said the number is expected to reach 3,000 by the end of September, and thousands more of nonpolitical Cubans are being processed under the agreement that allows up to 20,000 ordinary immigrants a year to enter the United States.

Grudging Tolerance

In another effort to polish its image, the government has for the past year grudgingly tolerated the activities of two illicit home-grown human rights groups, permitting their members, almost all of them ex-political prisoners, to report stories of human rights abuses to the U.N. commission and to meet with foreign journalists and diplomats.

Gustavo Arcos is secretary general of the largest group, the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, founded clandestinely two years ago by a Marxist former university professor, Ricardo Bofill Pages, who has served three prison terms and survived numerous scrapes with the Castro regime.

Like its smaller offshoot, the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, Bofill’s group is technically illegal. Its members know they could be clapped back into prison at any time for violating the law. As it is, the degree of freedom that Bofill, Arcos and their group enjoy is at best tentative.

Bofill has been reviled in the Communist Party newspaper, Granma, as “totally twisted and imbued with double-dealing lies, faking, deception and, especially, a monstrous ego and unquenchable thirst for fame and notoriety.” Visitors to his apartment have been forced to run a gauntlet of epithets from government-inspired “bystanders.”

Dependent on Relatives

The Arcos brothers say that they and most other dissidents have been denied paying jobs.

“We live only with the help of our relatives and friends in Cuba,” said Sebastian Arcos, who served the Castro regime as a navy officer and as deputy minister of finance before being jailed for trying to free Gustavo and a second imprisoned brother, Umberto.

Another Arcos brother, Luis, died at Castro’s side as a guerrilla fighter in the Sierra Maestra in 1956

Government harassment of the human rights activists even reached the point of diplomatic incident last month. On July 15, the press officer of the U.S. Interests Section, Jerry Scott, and his wife, Patricia, who coordinates the processing of U.S.-bound Cuban refugees, gave a small cocktail party to which they invited a score of activists, including Gustavo and Sebastian Arcos and a few Western diplomats.

The Castro government promptly protested that “during the meeting, the American officers spent their time advising these anti-social elements on what to do during the announced visit to Cuba of a delegation from the (U.N.) Human Rights Commission.”

Visas Canceled

In retaliation, Cuba canceled the visas of U.S. Rep. Daniel A. Mica (D-Fla.), five aides of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a State Department official as they prepared to board a plane to Havana to investigate possible security leaks at the U.S. Interests Section. The State Department protested in turn, asserting that the Scott party was a “normal part of routine diplomatic practice.”

Some journalists here thought it significant that the Castro government created an international diplomatic incident over the party instead of retaliating directly against the Arcos brothers and other activists. They speculated that Cuba may be setting the stage to discredit the activists’ testimony to the U.N. Human Rights delegation with accusations that it was rehearsed by U.S. officials. By doing that, the government could be paving the way for a crackdown on the activists after the U.N. group leaves.

“For doing what we are doing now, we would have been arrested a couple of years ago,” said Sebastian Arcos Jr., 27, an ex-political prisoner and activist like his father and uncle, but not a member of the Bofill group. “It’s not happening only because of the campaign in the United Nations. Ordinarily, just having a meeting and making a press release could get everyone put in jail.”

Family Freedom Bid

The younger Sebastian Arcos served a one-year prison sentence crammed in a cell less than 4 by 10 feet in area with his father and uncle, who served six and seven years respectively. The three were jailed for a family attempt to flee Cuba by fishing boat in 1981.

They all served out their terms in the same cell, sleeping on a bare, three-tiered bunk, said Sebastian Jr. “There was no window,” he added. “The barred cell door was covered with a metal shield with only a slot at the bottom to slide in our food, so we could not see out into the corridor. And there was one bare light fixture with a 500-watt bulb. I was nearly fried in the top bunk.”

Sebastian Jr. is now the only family member with a paying job. He said he received the Cuban equivalent of $128 a month for feeding fish and cleaning aquarium tanks at a state-owned enterprise that exports tropical fish.

Young Sebastian’s mother, sister and grandparents succeeded in leaving Cuba several years ago, and he is hoping soon to receive an exit visa to join them in Miami as one of the political refugees due to be admitted to the United States by the end of September. He hopes that his father, too, will be allowed to leave, but he is less hopeful about his uncle Gustavo, the family member who was closest to Castro in the early days of the revolution.

Official Slander?

“They always try to hide the fact that people who fought alongside Castro have turned against him,” said the senior Sebastian. “Castro said Gustavo Arcos ‘has racist and fascist ideas,’ and if the government ever has to mention his name they always add the phrase, ‘now traitor to the revolution.’ ”

But Gustavo Arcos said he has not given up hope. Castro has made it clear that at least 40 political prisoners who are still in jail will not be released. Most are known to have had close ties to him once. But neither the leader nor other government officials have yet mentioned Gustavo Arcos or other former political prisoners who are now free and have qualified for entry into the United States but have not yet been granted Cuban exit visas.

Officials in the U.S. Interests Section are confident that most, if not all members of the Bofill human rights group will eventually receive their exit visas. It will be ironic if they do, however, since their departure from Cuba will mean the end of the human rights group.

Nonetheless, Gustavo said he hopes to be among them.

“Of course, I want to leave,” he said. “I am not really a citizen here any more. I don’t want to keep on living in a system that I don’t like. I believe I can be more useful outside the country. Without dramatizing, I’m an old man and I want to dedicate the few years I have left to the fight to re-establish democracy in Cuba.”