Dying To Flee Cuba

Dying To Flee Cuba

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 5/4/2007

Democracy: Thursday's shootout at Havana International Airport by army
conscripts seeking to flee Cuba underlines how badly Cuban youth want
out. The mutineers will be executed, but it's the regime that's dying.

Like desperados, three Cuban army conscripts tried to shoot their way
out of the communist regime. Not knowing better, they had an awful plan,
first trying to hijack a Spanish tourist jet, and then getting captured.
In a hail of gunfire, they took a lieutenant colonel down with them. The
three young men, ages 19 and 21, are likely to face a firing squad
before this week is over.

This isn't the first time Cuba's rank and file have turned their weapons
on their officers. In February, three other teenage conscripts turned
their weapons on two officers in Santiago, also trying to escape the
island after a prisoner they were guarding offered to show them how.

But last week's public incident made world headlines and embarrassed the
Cuban regime, which then denounced the soldiers as "terrorists" and
blamed the U.S.

"Once again," said an official statement by the Ministry of the
Interior, "this demonstrates the criminal nature of the Cuban Adjustment
Act, a law that encourages vandalistic and criminal actions." The
reference was to a U.S. policy of granting asylum to any Cuban who can
make it to our shores on his own.

Coming from the Castro regime, that was pretty rich. Cuba is one of only
two countries in the world (the other is communist North Korea) where
citizens cannot freely leave. Only a few thousand exit permits are given
each year, and under special conditions.

"Permission to leave is hard to get, and Cubans must leave everything
behind to go. They pay thousands to the government for the permits,"
author Humberto Fontova told us. Would-be exiles must take special jobs
to pay the government off first, he says.

So desperate acts like Thursday's hijacking come as no surprise. They
reflect an unbearable life in a country that offers no freedom, no
material goods and no hope.

The million or so young people born in Cuba after 1992 feel it most.
With nothing at stake, many can think only of escape, and once the
desire to leave takes hold it can become obsessive, even irrational,
Fontova said.

In his new book, "Exposing the Real Che," Fontova tells of dissident
Rafael Contreras, who happened upon some young Cubans at a beach,
looking bitterly at the horizon. Instead of finding the shoreline
calming, as people the world over do, the kids told Contreras: "It
incarcerates us, worse than jail bars."

Dictator Fidel Castro is dying, but the regime remains in stasis, and
the lingering oligarchy is adamant there will never be reform.

More than a million Cubans have fled to freedom over the course of the
48-year Castro dictatorship, with hundreds of thousands of those taking
their chances on leaky boats.

Now, it's the same desperation that drives others to use their military
weapons as tools for escape. This seems to be happening more often.

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