For Cuba's traveling dissidents, an anxious return

For Cuba's traveling dissidents, an anxious return

Will Castro opponents face retaliation back home?

HAVANA, Cuba — Taking full advantage of their new license to travel
abroad, Cuba's leading dissidents have been on a whirlwind campaign in
recent weeks, denouncing President Raul Castro's government on three
continents and promising new tactics to challenge its 53-year rule.

Now the question is: What happens when they return home?

Famed blogger Yoani Sanchez says she plans to launch a new media company
after completing her 80-day trip through Latin America, the United
States and Europe. Activist Eliecer Avila wants to form a political
party to "negotiate" with the government. Another opposition figure,
Ladies in White leader Berta Soler, has vowed to continue going abroad
to "seek solidarity" for her cause.

But even if the Castro government is allowing dissidents to travel,
speak freely and raise money abroad, there's little to indicate that a
warm reception awaits them at home. Many observers will be watching to
see if the activists face retaliatory measures from Cuban authorities,
particularly if they attempt to launch new political organizations or
protests.

The first activist to return will be Rosa Maria Paya, whose father
Oswaldo Paya was killed in a car crash last July. She has spent the past
several weeks lobbying for an international investigation into the
crash, alleging that the government played a role in her father's death
and has orchestrated a sinister cover-up since then.

Angel Carromero, the Spanish politician who was the driver in the fatal
crash, was convicted in Cuba last year of what amounts to involuntary
manslaughter, then allowed to return to Spain and serve his four-year
prison sentence at home. But after meeting with Paya in Spain, he
changed his story, telling an interviewer that Cuban government agents
were indeed to blame for the crash.

Carromero has not filed an appeal to his conviction, nor repeated his
accusations elsewhere in public. But if the goal of Paya's trip was to
put pressure on the Cuban government and raise doubts about the
circumstances of the crash, she was successful.

Paya's daughter took her campaign to the United Nations Human Rights
Commission in Geneva, petitioning for an investigation, despite
objections from Cuba and several of its allies. A bipartisan group of US
senators have backed her, and Paya was also received by sympathetic
audiences at the European Parliament in Brussels.

"My goal was to bring together all the support and solidarity and begin
to channel it into something that can be more effective," she told the
Spanish news agency EFE, saying she would return to Havana in a matter
of days. "In that sense, I'm more or less satisfied, even though I won't
be completely content until there is an international investigation and
we obtain our rights in Cuba."

Cuba may attempt to punish Paya and other critics when they return, but
by allowing them to travel and meet face-to-face with foreign
politicians, newspaper editors and activist groups, any retaliatory
measures would probably raise an even greater international outcry.

There has been no indication that the government will try to block the
dissidents from coming home. But when blogger Yoani Sanchez was asked
what she would do if her return were barred, she said she would be "the
first person to board a raft to get back into Cuba."

More from GlobalPost: In the shadow of El Comandante

During stops in Brazil, Mexico and New York, Sanchez faced groups of
hostile protesters who tried to disrupt her events and prevent her from
speaking. But the boorish behavior only seemed to garner more support
for Sanchez, even among groups which might otherwise be sympathetic to
Cuba's government but were disturbed by the sight of hecklers trying to
prevent her from speaking freely.

Less clear is how successful she may be with plans to start a media
company back home. Although her blog is no longer censored by the
government, Sanchez has faced rough treatment when she has tried to take
her activism beyond her blog.

Sanchez's trip has also given the authorities new ammunition for their
caricature of her as a tool of foreign interests, as she has met in
Washington and Miami with anti-Castro militants and Cuban-American
politicians who oppose any easing of the US embargo.

But Sanchez has also used her megaphone to criticize the 50-year-old
trade sanctions against Cuba, urging greater engagement with the island,
not continued isolation.

Speaking at Miami's Freedom Tower on Monday, Sanchez asked Cuban exiles
to move past the political divisions that have long split families and
served as a kind of tropical Berlin Wall "made not of concrete nor
brick, but of lies, silence and ill will."

"In the Cuba that many of us dream of it won't be necessary to clarify
what type of Cuban you are," she said. "We'll just be Cubans, period."

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/cuba/130402/cuban-dissidents-yoani-sanchez-berta-soler-eliecer-avila