The Perverted Debate Over Torture and Human Rights

What happens in Cuba’s REAL gulags every day is worse than waterboarding and humane treatment of psychotic terrorist killers at Guantanamo!

For much of the past week Democrats have once again been wringing their hands about the handful of waterboarding interrogations which have saved thousands of American lives by preventing terrorist attacks. (see excerpts from Bush press conference 9/2006 for more)

And yet everyday, much worse treatment is being inflicted on inmates in Cuba. Not at Guantanamo Bay, but the REAL gulags to which Democrats are apparently blind.

Here’s sample:

A hero in Castro’s gulag
By Jeff Jacoby
Boston Globe
November 4, 2007

AT A White House ceremony tomorrow President Bush will honor eight distinguished men and women with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award. Among the recipients will be the longtime civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks; Harper Lee, author of the much-loved novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird”; and C-SPAN’s founder and president, Brian Lamb.

One of the honorees, however, will not be there. Instead of joining the president amid the pomp and finery of the White House, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet will spend the day locked in a fetid cell in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, where he is serving a 25-year prison sentence for speaking out against Fidel Castro’s dictatorship.

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, has written that the conditions of Biscet’s incarceration are like something out of Victor Hugo: “windowless and suffocating, with wretched sanitary conditions. The stench seeping from the pit in the ground that serves as a toilet is intensified by being compressed into an unventilated cell only as wide as a broom closet. . . . Biscet reportedly suffers from osteoarthritis, ulcers, and hypertension. His teeth, those that haven’t fallen out, are rotted and infected.”

(photo right: A replica of the solitary cell similar to the one Oscar Elias Biscet is kept in.)

A prolife Christian physician, Biscet first ran afoul of the Castro regime in the 1990s, when he investigated Cuban abortion techniques - Cuba has by far the highest abortion rates in the Western Hemisphere - and revealed that numerous infants had been killed after being delivered alive. In 1997, he began the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, which seeks “to establish in Cuba a state based on the rule of law” and “sustained upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” In 1999, he was given a three-year sentence for “disrespecting patriotic symbols.” To protest the regime’s repression, he had hung a Cuban flag upside down.

For decades, various American journalists and celebrities have rhapsodized about Castro’s supposed island paradise, resolutely ignoring the mountains of evidence that it is in reality a tropical dungeon. Intent on seeing Castro as a revolutionary hero and Cuba as Shangri-la, they avert their gaze from the island’s genuine heroes - the prisoners of conscience like Biscet, who pay a fearful price for their insistence on telling the truth.

The US detention center in Guantanamo Bay is sometimes spoken of as if it were a Caribbean concentration camp, but the only facilities that deserve such a label are hellholes like Combinado del Este, in which Biscet and so many other Cuban dissidents have been brutally abused - or worse. Over the years, life in Castro’s gulag has been well-chronicled. The classic narrative is Armando Valladares’s “Against All Hope,” a stark and searing memoir of the author’s 22 years in Cuba’s horrific prisons.

The newest account of life as a Cuban political prisoner is “Fighting Castro: A Love Story,” Kay Abella’s affecting and inspiring saga of one Cuban couple’s love for each other and for their homeland, and the cruelties, large and petty, inflicted on those who challenge the regime.

For Lino Fernandez, a young physician who pays for his democratic resistance with 17 years behind bars, those cruelties are sadistic and often bloody. Abella describes, for example, what it was like to experience a requisa - a search by armed prison guards - in the notorious round fortress on Isla de Pinos:

“A screaming mass of soldiers swarming over the circular, stabbing with bayonets, crushing limbs with truncheons and rubber-wrapped chains. The panic of no place to hide, knowing you’ll be beaten harder for trying to protect yourself, stomped on for clinging to a pillar or rail, thrown down the stairs for daring to hesitate. . . . The indignity of men whining, begging, whimpering before a skull is cracked, a shoulder yanked from its socket, genitals smashed with the gun butt.”

For the families of political prisoners, the cruelties come in other forms, such as the humiliating strip-searches on the rare occasions when a prison visit is permitted. And there is economic privation: Oscar Biscet’s wife, Elsa Morejon, is a trained nurse, but she has been barred from holding a professional job in Cuba since 1998.

The conscience and courage of these dissidents are nothing short of extraordinary. “During these years here in prison,” Biscet wrote to Elsa in a letter smuggled out of prison earlier this year, “I have seen shameful things that I am unable to describe to you in words because of their perversity and their attack on . . . civilized society. Despite this difficult situation I am not intimidated nor do I take any step backwards in my mind. . . . I will carry out this unjust sentence until the most high God puts an end to it.”

Well maybe we have an explanation for Hollywood celebrities support for Castro. After all, Fidel supports a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion, even if that means the baby is killed after being delivered alive!

Guantanamo A Gulag? Cuban Political Prisoners Could Only Be So Lucky!

Compare the light, well ventilated and sanitary conditions of Gitmo terrorists to a prisoner of conscience in Cuba. And of course there’s plenty of time to browse the Gitmo camp library (photo here) before lunch arrives (meal photo here. And if you get a cavity from all that food, no matter, there’s a first rate dental facility (photo). For more serious health problems, a fully equipped operating room is standing by (photo). And camp guards are nice enough to post a sign calling for quiet during prayer time (photo) while inmates enjoy prayer rugs and Korans supplied by U.S. taxpayers.

Unlike the real gulags just across the fence in Castro’s Cuba, the Guantanamo detention facility has been open to international human rights and media inspection.

The next time some lefty hand wringer moans about the evils of detaining murderous terrorists at Gitmo, ask them how many protests they have held for the prisoners in the REAL Cuban gulags?