AFP
By Isabel Sanchez AFP - Friday, February 8 07:32 pm
HAVANA (AFP) - A video of university students boldly challenging the
communist government on why Cubans cannot travel freely, or stay in
Cuban hotels, has stirred society as Cuba braces for possible reforms
and leadership change.
Interim president Raul Castro said January 20 the National Assembly
would elect Cuba's next president February 24, amid speculation ailing
Fidel Castro might not be its choice for the first time in almost five
decades. Raul Castro also has suggested lawmakers will soon be handling
potential reforms.
In a video made public over the Internet this week and circulated in
Havana, students grilled National Assembly speaker chief Ricardo
Alarcon, a top regime official, on sensitive social issues many critics
deem human rights abuses.
"Why don't the Cuban people have the real possibility to stay at hotels
or travel to different places around the world?" Eliecer Avila, a
self-avowed government supporter at the University of Computer Science,
demanded of Cuba's top lawmaker.
Alarcon tried to justify Cuba's policies controlling its nationals'
travel, saying: "if everybody in the world, all six billion inhabitants,
were able to travel wherever they pleased, there would be a tremendous
traffic jam in our planet's airspace.
"People who travel are really a minority," he said.
And in implied criticism of Cuba's economic policy, Avila asked why
staples such as food, cleaning products and clothing must be purchased
with convertible pesos, when workers everywhere are paid in normal
currency, which is worth 1/25th.
Alarcon, who reminded his audience of what the government maintains are
the gains made in 50 years of Cuban Revolution, did not address the
earning power/currency question, and sidestepped another question about
the limits the government has on Internet access.
Another student, Alejandro Hernandez, asked why he should have turned
out to vote for uncontested candidates in January 20 voting. "Where did
the (government's idea of a) 'united vote' come from; I am supposed to
go out and vote for every one of them when I don't know who they are?"
he demanded.
Avila bluntly demanded to know what the country's socialist economic
plan was.
"I am sure there is one, but we want to know what it is," he asked,
saying his farmer father and grandfather "have grown old trudging behind
a pack of oxen, and they still don't know."
Some Havana residents who saw the video were convinced it was staged by
the government to float some balloons on possible reforms.
"This has to have been set up (by the government) because I cannot
believe they would dare to talk like that otherwise," a waiter at a
cafeteria in the El Cerro neighborhood said privately.
In any case, "everything those kids are saying is right on the mark," a
32-year-old housewife in the Miramar district added, on condition she
not be named.
The question-and-answer session with Alarcon follows interim president
Raul Castro's suggestion last year that people should speak without fear
about the problems the country is facing.
Raul Castro, 76, took over from his brother Fidel Castro, 81, on a
"temporary" basis while his elder brother recovers from intestinal
surgery he underwent in July 2006. Fidel Castro has not been seen in
public since.
Potential Cuban travel freedom now could be a security concern for the
United States, one of Washington's own making. The United States grants
immediate residency and work permits to any Cuban who sets foot on US soil.
In Washington, Rob McInturff, a State Department spokesman, said that
while the United States continues to "call for rights for the Cuban
people," free travel would force the US to revisit the so-called "wet
foot, dry foot" policy.
Under the rule, Cubans who emigrate illegally and are picked up at sea
are returned to the island, while any Cuban landing in the United States
can stay, work and get temporary health care and fast-tracked US
citizenship.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080208/tpl-cuba-politics-youth-castro-rights-ee974b3_1.html
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