OxBlog

# Posted 4:46 PM by Patrick Belton

PICKING UP HITCHHIKERS IN CUBA: Flying back from my Beckett pilgrimage, I caught this absolutely wonderful piece on Cuba which appeared in the FT over the weekend. Richard Lapper, the FT's Latin America editor, became frustrated with the reticence of Havanans living in a police state to discuss politics, and thus set out with his wife to ten days of ferrying around hitchhikers, and discussing politics, in a rental car:

The trip offers an opportunity to talk to Cubans unencumbered by fears that we might be overheard or that our conversation might be reported to the authorities. The dense network of Revolutionary Defence Committees - Cuba's steelier version of Neighbourhood Watch - is one reason there isn't much crime but it also helps ensure political orthodoxy. When we talked about political issues before we left Havana, many people refused to speak. Others resorted to miming, or referred to Castro simply by stroking an imaginary beard.

So, posing as foreign tourists, we take to the road. We stuff most of our luggage into the hatchback's boot and perch a suitcase on its side on the back seat, leaving just enough room for a passenger or - at a stretch - two. We fill up with petrol, paying in dollars, and set off to find the Autopista Nacional, the eight-lane highway that will take us east into deepest Cuba.

What he finds is not surprising of a police state which spies on and imprisons its human rights workers and poets: "In less than two hours we give lifts to five Cubans, and the picture they are painting of Fidel Castro's Cuba is not attractive. While the ubiquitous roadside slogans urge sacrifice to defend the revolution, Castro seems to be losing the battle of ideas." (Lapper's ending sentence is particularly evocative: "In the gloom, I vaguely make out yet another fading party slogan on a roadside billboard. "Firmness and dignity", it reads.")

This should be required reading for the misguided collegiate fans of the regime, along with Human Rights Watch's extensive documentation of Cuba's repression of its people (including congressional testimony last month by OxBlog's friend Tom Malinowski, a Rhodes scholar from 1989) Although in its report on the latest wave of brutal political repression, Amnesty International curiously spends most of its words playing for the gallery and attacking the U.S. embargo and (quote) the "war on terror" - their scare quotes. (Amnesty's bias against actually looking at countries that repress their people, and instead concentrating with increasing exclusivity solely on criticizing the United States, has been well documented - a sad end to an organization which once stood for human rights.)

Bravo for the FT for, unlike Amnesty, actually going there - and speaking with people who actually live under the regime.

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