Playing mind games in Cuba and China

Playing mind games in Cuba and China
By Fred Hiatt, Thursday, April 11, 1:19 AM

Why would Cuban security agents choose to kill the island's leading
dissident while he was in the company of two Europeans who might bear
witness to the crime?

To outside observers, it's an intriguing mystery. For those directly
affected, even to ask the question is, in some sense, to surrender to
the malign influence of authoritarian control. That was one message this
week from two inspiring young women, daughters of courageous democracy
activists from opposite sides of the world, who happened to be in
Washington at the same time.

"I'm not so anxious to understand the perverse logic of repression,"
Rosa Maria Payá, 24, replied when I asked why agents might have targeted
her father that way.

"I don't think there is a reason to kill anyone," she added. "And I
shouldn't have to be having to answer that. This is a question to put to
the people who threatened his life on a daily basis."

Violence, censorship and imprisonment are the obvious weapons of
dictators, from Cuba to China. But the tools of repression also include
caprice. If no one can be sure who will be targeted and who will not —
when rule by whim replaces rule of law — then everyone must live in fear.

That is the dictator's hope. Payá and Ti-Anna Wang, 23, decline to play
along.

Wang's father, Wang Bingzhang, is a democracy activist who was living in
exile in North America 11 years ago when he traveled to Vietnam for a
meeting with Chinese labor activists.

He was kidnapped, bundled across the Chinese border, held incommunicado
for six months and then, after a closed one-day trial, sentenced to life
in prison on spurious charges of terrorism.

Why was Wang targeted and not other exile leaders? For that matter, why
has his daughter not been granted a visa to visit her father for the
past four years? Each application has been denied — without explanation.
Ti-Anna Wang said she refuses to waste time speculating on motivation.

"The arbitrariness is designed to break your spirit," she said. "We
really can't dwell on wondering why they do what they do, or fear what
they might do, because those thoughts are crippling."

Payá's father, Oswaldo Payá, was the leader of a peaceful movement
advocating free elections and human rights in Cuba. He died last July in
what the Cuban government has called a one-car accident, in which the
driver, a Spanish sympathizer of Payá, supposedly drove into a tree.

But photos of the car show that it was smashed from behind, and the
driver, Ángel Carromero, has said that he was run off the road by a car
he believes was driven by government agents. He and a Swedish associate
in the front seat survived; Payá and a Cuban associate, both in the back
seat, were killed.

Two months earlier Payá narrowly survived another suspicious crash. Were
agents so infuriated by that escape that they were determined to try
again, no matter what the consequences? Was the operation intended just
to bump and scare Payá? Or did the agents welcome a chance to act with
Europeans present — a sign to all Cubans that there is no protection, no
matter who your friends may be?

For outsiders, such theorizing can be seductive. For people living under
the regime's control, it is — and is intended to be — debilitating.

"I can speculate about the motive," Rosa Maria Payá said during a visit
to The Post. "I can speculate about why now and not before or after. But
I can also talk about what I know for sure."

Here are some things Payá and Wang said they know for sure.

Wang: "Any government that jails its own people for political dissent
still has a long way to go to become a respected member of the
international community."

Payá: "Dictatorships have no political color: not right or left, they
are only dictatorships. Cubans are entitled to their rights, and this is
more human than political."

Why did the Cuban government allow Payá to travel, when dissidents are
frequently denied exit permits? Maybe officials hoped to lend
credibility to their faux reform. Maybe they hoped she would stay in exile.

Payá said she doesn't know and isn't trying to figure it out. She
intends to return to her Havana home next week, to continue the fight
for democracy and for an honest accounting of her father's death.

Fred Hiatt's "Nine Days," a novel for young adults inspired partly by
Ti-Anna Wang's story, was published this week.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fred-hiatt-in-cuba-and-china-playing-mind-games-with-dissidents/2013/04/10/1d73c77e-a1e4-11e2-82bc-511538ae90a4_story.html