Cuban women speak out about paradise lost to Castro's tyranny

by Myriam Marquez

The 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair sits with women in their 50s and 60s in a Miami living room, singing a parody of a revolutionary anthem they recall from their years wasted in Cuba's gulags.

Fidel Castro's regime branded them political prisoners. Some of them lost their youth. Others lost their husbands to the communist regime's firing squads. Others missed out on their children's first steps, first words.

They are branded, but they carry their wounds with honor, dignity.

Back in Havana, the young, Cuban women of different races -- some barely into puberty -- traipse the Malecon, the city's sea wall, to pick up foreign men looking for jineteras (that's Cuban revolutionary slang for prostitutes). One says she's an engineer; another says she's a teacher. Fidel Castro's revolution, the one that promised equality and prosperity for all, has forced these women into selling their bodies to feed their families.

They are the walking wounded.

Then there are the young women fleeing on rafts, holding their young children tightly against their bosoms. The two little girls' bodies buried under rocks of a Caribbean key, girls who died fleeing Castro's "paradise."

There's the 20-something radio reporter who lost her job and was beaten by government thugs for stating in a live radio report, during an interview with foreigners, that Cubans can't enjoy the same privileges that tourists do. The former political prisoners, the jineteras, the rafters, the journalists, the mothers, the daughters -- all of them Cuban women, all of them marked for life by Castro's revolution. They are featured in a documentary, "Cuban Women Branded by Paradise".

Why should you care?

It's a question I hear often. There are dozens of dictatorships throughout the world, and the United States can't play good cop to them all. Why should Americans be bothered by the atrocities a Cuban caudillo commits on women, children, men, humanity?

The answer will determine where little Elian Gonzalez will live. Ever since the Cuban boy was rescued at sea in November, many Americans have said the choice is simple. They want the 6-year-old boy, whose mother died at sea -- another woman branded by "paradise" -- back with his father in Cuba.

The Cuban exile community has appeared intransigent, anti-family and overzealous in its demands that Elian be spared Castro's hell. And yet Cuba's human-rights record is among the worst in the world. Children are abused in a system that forces them to work in camps, on sugar plantations, when they turn 12 and be loyal to the revolution and not to their families or religious beliefs. Don't Americans understand what's really going on just 90 miles south of Florida's shores?

"I think the story of Cuba's abuses is told more than it is listened to," said Rollins psychology professor Maria R. Ruiz. "I was very moved when I first saw the film. It strikes me that there's an incredible level of misrepresentation in the news media about Cuba's reality."

The Cuban Civil Society of Central Florida and Telemundo's Central Florida affiliate stations are helping sponsor the documentary, which has been shown at art theaters and on college campuses throughout the country. Telemundo general manager Laura Santos said sponsors hope to raise money for a documentary that will profile the Cuban regime's "systematic violation" of children's rights, of human rights, in Cuba.

Whatever you may believe about Cuba, Castro and his failed revolution, this film is worth watching for its simplicity and its heartfelt frankness. Three generations of women speak from their hearts about their hopes for freedom in a paradise stolen from them.

END

Myriam Marquez
Columnist

Published in The Orlando Sentinel on March 17, 2000

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