About a month ago, I wrote about Cuban independent journalist Claudia Marquez who's long been harassed for her writing and whose husband, Oswaldo Alfonso, was thrown in the slammer as a political dissident last year. Two weeks ago, the Cuba government released Alfonso and a couple of others. It also just gave Marquez and Alfonso permision to emigrate.
It's a kind of Faustian bargain: You can be free and not have to worry about what you say and write-- so long as you abandon your homeland and family. Still, Marquez and Alfonso are planning on taking the deal.
Which is where our administration comes in to further its agenda of freedom and family values: Marquez just told me that while the U.S. has given her permission to immigrate, it has denied it for her husband.
At his trial Alfonso, essentially alone among dissidents, "confessed" to having served the interests of the U.S. Marquez says that's why the U.S. denied him entry. I don't know how she knows that--I have an email back to her now. (Did embassy officials say that? Is she assuming?) But it makes sense to me: Except for the "confession," there aren't particular differences between Marquez's case and her husband's.
And it jibes with what I heard in Cuba this summer: A few political types who wanted to leave told me the U.S. was being particularly tight-fisted about visas. To get one, you had to be politically pure. That is, never a member of the Communist party. (Maybe there's a Cuban Chalabi in charge of a de-communistification program.)
