Through the negotiations of Cuba’s Cardinal Ortega, the Cuban government has just agreed to release 52 political prisoners—about two-thirds of the prisoners known to have been seized in the 2003 government campaign against political opposition.
During John Paul II’s 1998 visit to the island, many commentators suggested that change was coming to Castro’s regime, but Cuba never quite managed to join the march of democracy that toppled dictatorships through the 1990s. Still, this prisoner release—and the open acknowledgment of the Catholic Church as a legitimate independent agent for negotiating the release of even non-religious prisoners—has to be taken as a good sign.
July 12th, 2010 | 9:17 am
A regime that chooses to sentence peaceful dissidents to 25 years’ incarceration for establishing independent lending libraries will release them when convenient and then re-arrest them as needed. Praise God whenever any political prisoner anywhere is released, but they should never have been arrested in the first place. This is Kabuki theater. A damaged Church gives a bloody regime credibility. And vice-versa. Let us not praise the wife-beater too much when he takes a day off from battering.