Inside Castro's Prisons

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Reprisals have been taken against several Cuban intellectuals who have already spent many years behind bars or in concentration camps. At the end of May, the former diplomat and poet Andrés Vargas Gómez—grandson of General Máximo Gómez, the architect of Cuban independence—left prison seriously ill. He has been relentlessly threatened and kept under close surveillance, and was told he would never be permitted to leave the country. The poet Angel Cuadra, the socialist Ricardo Bofill, the sociologist Enrique Hernández, the mathematician Adolfo Rivero and many others find themselves in the same situation.

For years the Cuban government has been able to conceal its repressive nature, torturing and burying its dead in secrecy, gagging its victims. After almost a quarter of a century of Communism in Cuba, no one can continue to excuse its crimes by talking of the immaturity of the political process. No philosophy, no symbol, can justify the impunity with which Castroism kills its enemies.