How Should the West Reward Castro for Releasing Prisoners from His "Pigsty"?

Confronted with Fidel Castro's early December release of a handful of political prisoners, members of the European Union, pressed by Spain's Zapatero, have eased their opposition while debating to what extent they should normalize relations with the Caribbean island.

Meanwhile, Olivier Languepin has an article on the "hellish" prison of Boniato. The Cuban Guantánamo (it is located not far from its Yanqui counterpart) is quite a different place from the American Guantánamo ("If I were to make a one-sentence summary of this ordeal" at Boniato, said Manuel Vazquez Portal, "I would say I spent 15 months inside the latrines of an army barracks or inside a pigsty"), but apart from this (token) article, the least one can say is that Le Monde has not written a whole hell of a lot about the subject. (More here…). When you think about it, though, isn't that normal, after all, given that the independent daily's clear responsability to its readers is to keep them informed of "the crimes of the Americans"? (The latest example, in which Éric Fottorino coined a new word, appeared as long ago as… this afternoon.)

A year or so ago, I quoted a New York Times op-ed column:

Is it too much to say that more Chiliens would have died and suffered (if only economically), had Allende's party remained in power? Maybe. But if the past — and other leftist systems — serve as any kind of example, [the fact remains that the sequels "of arrests, death, torture, and exile" are often worse under would-be leftist authoritarian régimes than under rightist ones], including in Latin America. In that perspective, the testimony of a Cuban dissident is instructive: the jails of Fidel Castro are far worse than those of Fulgencio Batista, he says. Who is the writer? A capitalist reactionary? An imperialist? A (neo-)fascist? A Batista ally? No. Gustavo Arcos Bergnes is Castro's fellow revolutionary, imprisoned with the future Líder Maximo in the mid-1950s. And he experienced Castro both as a fellow cell-mate and (twice) as a warden. Castro's violent revolutionaries of the 1950s were treated far more humanely by the dictator Batista than non-violent human rights activists are treated by Castro today, he says as he recalls getting special treatment (hospital rooms as cells, private cooking facilities, etc) and pardons after only 21 months. (Since Castro's coming to power, incidentally, there have been 20,000 summary executions, but — unlike Pinochet's 3,000 victims — these are not of any more concern to "human rights activists" than those killed by Spain's Republicans in the 1930s.)

Back to the position that the EU and the West should adopt:

This is … the moment to ask ourselves two key questions:

writes Carlos Alberto Montaner (while informing us, among other things that "a grandson of Ernesto 'Che' Guevera" has gone into exile abroad).

Why is Castro relenting at this time? and What should the international community do now that Castro has given ground? In Don't reward Castro for releasing prisoners, he provides the answers:

The answer [to the second question] was given by Socialist Javier Solana, who happens to be the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Policy and Security: "The European Union has nothing to give Cuba for correcting an injustice."

That's a fact. It would be a huge mistake to reward Castro for pausing in the commission of a crime. For half a century, the Comandante has learned that the simplest way to achieve his ends is to mistreat the Cubans or harm any unfriendly society and then "sell" to his adversaries a halt to his dastardly behavior.