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01/15/13 - Fox News - Cuban dissidents eager to test government assurances on their right to travel ...

HAVANA -  For years, Cuban dissidents say, authorities' message to them
has been the same: Sure, you can leave the country. Just don't expect us
to let you come back.

Now, two prominent and outspoken government opponents say they've been
told they can come and go freely under a new law that eliminated
decades-old travel restrictions on nearly all islanders.

It's a calculated risk that potentially enables the dissidents to become
high-profile ambassadors for change in the communist-run country,
traveling abroad to accept awards and slamming the government back home in
speeches to foreign parliaments. At the same time, it blunts one of their
main criticisms of Cuba's human rights record, that it effectively held
them and others hostage by restricting their movement.

"Previously the policy was just to get them out of the country, which
really, really did work for the maintenance of the Castro government,"
said Ann Louise Bardach, a longtime Cuba analyst and author of "Cuba
Confidential."

"But if they are allowing them to come back, we are looking at a
game-changer of sorts because that could usher in the first embryonic
state of some democratic process," Bardach said. "If people can go abroad,
criticize the government and return, that's a new day in Cuba."

The government faces some of the same pluses and minuses with all Cubans
traveling abroad, showing that it is being more open by letting its
citizens leave more easily, but taking the risk that some won't come back.
Travelers seeing the world for the first time are apt to experience things
that could give them cause to clamor for more freedoms or material goods
back home, or it could make them more grateful for basic guarantees like
free health care and education. Some will surely have both those
reactions.

Cubans of all political stripes lined up outside travel agencies and
migration offices when the law scrapping the country's exit visa
requirement went into effect Monday, looking to book flights, renew
expired passports or just get information about how the measure would
affect them.

Among them was Yoani Sanchez, a dissident blogger who has garnered fame
overseas for her writings about the frustrations of daily life. Sanchez
says she has been turned down 20 times when she asked for permission to
travel abroad to accept awards or attend conferences, and authorities told
her she would only be allowed out if she was leaving for good.

It's a practice that has been used to rid the island of a number of people
considered troublemakers, including dozens of activists who were
imprisoned in 2003 during a notorious crackdown on dissent. Under an
agreement brokered by the Roman Catholic Church, many of them accepted
exile in Spain as a condition of their release in recent years, although
some holdouts were freed and allowed to stay in Cuba.

Sanchez said that to her surprise, an official told her Monday she will be
able to leave and return once she has her new passport, a process that
should take around two weeks.

Shortly before turning in that night, she tweeted enthusiastically about
her intention to visit friends in Canada: "I will dream of embraces, walls
that fall and borders that dissolve."

Sanchez will apparently be the first dissident to test the government's
word, but she's not alone.

In interviews with The Associated Press, several others confirmed plans to
travel in the near term, including two recent winners of the European
Union's Sakharov prize who were denied permission to collect the award in
person.

They include Berta Soler, a leader of the Ladies in White protest group,
who hopes to organize a delegation of the women to travel to Strasbourg,
France, to pick up their prize from 2005.

Guillermo Farinas, a noted hunger striker and 2010 Sakharov winner, said
state security agents took the trouble of driving out to his home in the
central city of Santa Clara to let him know he'll be allowed to travel and
return.

Both Farinas and Soler would presumably use the opportunity as a bully
pulpit to bash their home country, seek support from sympathetic groups
and lobby foreign governments to press Havana on human rights and
democracy.

"My position will be the same wherever I am. I will say the same thing
anywhere," Farinas said. "I believe the Cuban government should be
replaced by a democratic government, and it is up to the Cuban citizenry
to put another government in place or ratify the one that's there."

Cuban authorities brand the small dissident community as traitors and
generally avoid mentioning them except to accuse them of being
"counterrevolutionaries" who accept foreign money to undermine the
government.

Communist officials are certain to be uncomfortable about the prospect of
dissidents raising their international profiles and building alliances
abroad. But President Raul Castro's government apparently feels the
benefits outweigh the risks.

"The dissidents are going to have the same criticisms as before, except
that they're going to be allowed to travel where they couldn't before,"
said Philip Peters, a veteran Cuba analyst at the Lexington Institute, a
Virginia-based think tank. "I think it makes the Cuban government look
stronger because they're saying they have nothing to fear by having their
political critics leave Cuba and come back."

The law contains a clause letting the government deny passports under some
circumstances including for reasons of national security, and most assumed
that article would be applied to the dissidents.

So some people remain skeptical that Sanchez, Farinas and perhaps others
will be allowed to come and go freely

"I don't know," said activist Elizardo Sanchez, who said he has pending
invitations to Spain and other countries for his work heading up an
organization that monitors human rights on the island. "We'll just have to
wait and see."

Government officials' problem with dissidents' travel is essentially the
opposite their concerns about other Cubans: The worry that young,
talented, ambitious and highly educated islanders will seek their fortunes
elsewhere. But always-cautious Cuba surely feels it will win this gamble
as well.

The law contains provisions encouraging Cubans to return by letting them
stay overseas longer while still retaining the right to come back,
hopefully pumping money into the struggling economy through remittances
and any savings brought home. And a slight migratory outflow could ease
social pressure, with the most discontent people opting not to return
home.

"This is a calculated risk because they obviously feel that they can
endure," Bardach said. "Otherwise this would not be something that would
be done. Nothing happens in Cuba fast."

___

Associated Press writers Anne-Marie Garcia and Andrea Rodriguez in Havana
contributed to this report.

___

Peter Orsi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Peter_Orsi


Original Source / Fuente Original:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/15/cuban-dissidents-eager-to-test-government-assurances-on-their-right-to-travel/