[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 1]
[House]
[Pages 658-659]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




     ACTS OF AGGRESSION AGAINST CUBAN DISSIDENT MARTA BEATRIZ ROQUE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Florida (Mr. Diaz-Balart) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DIAZ-BALART. Mr. Speaker, among the many foreigners who have 
recently gone to Communist Cuba to meet with the dictator has been the 
President of Mexico, Vicente Fox.
  He arrived there this last weekend, held the customary long meetings 
with the dictator; and then, before leaving on Monday, in a gesture 
that deserves commendation, Mr. Fox and his foreign minister, Mr. 
Castaneda, invited a small group of dissidents and independent 
journalists to meet with them at the Mexican embassy.
  Most unfortunately, the foreign minister of the Cuban dictatorship, 
an immodest man who nonetheless has much to be modest about, announced 
that Mr. Fox had assured the Cuban dictator that Castro has nothing to 
fear from Mexico in the upcoming session of the U.N. Human Rights 
Commission in Geneva, where the Cuban dictatorship's record on human 
rights has been condemned almost every year for the past decade.
  If the statement of the foreign minister of the Cuban dictatorship, 
Mr. Perez, is true, it would be most unfortunate, since Mr. Fox's 
election represented a great victory for democracy in Mexico after more 
than 70 years of a rotating dictatorship in that country. And Mr. Fox 
was expected by his people and by the international community to be a 
great leader in defense of democracy.
  Perez of the Cuban dictatorship is not someone who tends to be 
believable, so we should walk the extra mile, though certainly without 
illusions, and still give Mr. Fox the benefit of the doubt with regard 
to what Mexico will do regarding human rights at this spring's meeting 
of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
  What will Mr. Fox do, considering what happened to one of the most 
respected dissidents in Cuba, Marta Beatriz Roque, after she attended 
the meeting with President Fox at the Mexican embassy in Havana this 
past Monday? Of the opposition figures within Cuba, there is no one 
more respected nor deserving of respect than this Cuban woman, an 
economist by training and director of the Cuban Institute of 
Independent Economists, Marta Beatriz Roque.
  She, along with imprisoned opposition activists who suffered the most 
brutal aspects of the totalitarian repression of the dictatorship, is 
admired by all freedom-loving Cubans, as well as by supporters of 
democracy for Cuba throughout the world.

                              {time}  1800

  Well, on the night of the day of her meeting with President Fox and 
Foreign Minister Castaneda, just this last Monday, Marta Beatriz Roque 
was visited at her house by a typical array of goons, thugs and 
hoodlums sent by the dictator who told her that she had to accompany 
them to a detention center for questioning while her house was 
fumigated.
  She was then taken to a detention center by these thugs, physically 
assaulted, strip-searched and insulted repeatedly for hours on end. 
While this was happening, the so-called fumigation was taking place at 
her house. The furniture and windows were destroyed, and Marta Beatriz 
Roque's few belongings were ransacked.
  Marta Beatriz Roque's crime? She had met that morning with President 
Fox and Foreign Minister Castaneda, and she had spoken bravely in 
support of democracy for Cuba.
  So what will President Fox do about this? The act of aggression 
against Marta Beatriz Roque was a way for the Cuban dictator to show 
his disdain and contempt for President Fox and Foreign Minister 
Castaneda, as well as for the Cuban people, whose democratic 
aspirations are thoroughly represented by Marta Beatriz Roque.
  What will you do, President Fox and Foreign Minister Castaneda? Will 
you do as Castro's Foreign Minister says and fail even to acknowledge 
the gross and constant violations of human

[[Page 659]]

rights in Cuba when the United Nations Human Rights Commission 
discusses this issue in Geneva in the coming weeks, or will you do what 
you should do and condemn this atrocity against one of your guests at 
the Mexican Embassy in Cuba this past Monday?
  What will the world do, Mr. Speaker? What will our colleagues in this 
Congress do? One of them showed his feelings on the subject of the 
oppression of Cuba by allowing a member of the delegation that he 
traveled to Cuba with recently to give the Cuban dictator a cap like 
the one worn by the New York Fire Department. That symbol of American 
heroism, of supreme American dignity, was given to the dictator who for 
more than four decades has imprisoned, tortured, exiled and executed 
those who fight for the freedoms which this country represents.
  The gift of that cap to the dictator and the attitude that it 
reflects is grotesque. It is insulting not only to the Cuban people, 
but to Americans as well, and it is condemnable.
  It is time to stop dining and joking with the Cuban dictator. The 
time has come to side with the oppressed people of Cuba. They will soon 
be free, but they deserve solidarity in their time of darkness.

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