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Cuba is a far cry from being a workers’ paradise

As Washington and Havana do their diplomatic song and dance—more like a fire-and-brimstone limbo from Cuba’s self-anointed “retired” ruler Fidel Castro—Pedro Pablo Alvarez Ramos wants the world to know: Cuban workers have no rights.

Why should we care?

Because as President Barack Obama looks to open U.S.-Cuba policy, some labor unions, particularly those in Europe, insist that the island is a workers’ paradise with fair wages and safe workplaces.

Last week, Alvarez Ramos met with leaders of United Teachers of Dade to ask for support of independent labor unions and to press Cuba to release political prisoners.

“Until people can really associate freely and speak freely about working conditions, there’s no real reform,” UTD President Karen Aronowitz said.

Alvarez Ramos knows firsthand that workers clamoring for such rights wind up in jail. In 2003, he was among the 75 independent union activists, journalists, librarians and human rights activists accused of being U.S. “mercenaries” and imprisoned.

Twenty-one have since been freed because of poor health or because of international pressure. Nine labor organizers are among the 54 who remain behind bars.

Alvarez Ramos’ “choice” last year was to stay in a squalid cell or leave on a Spanish military plane with three other political prisoners. He resents that he couldn’t stay in his homeland. It’s a feeling shared by many other former prisoners from the 1960s through the 1990s—one that surfaces whenever an American questions why exiles didn’t stay and fight.

A repairman of heavy machinery, Alvarez Ramos tried to organize workers at Havana docks in 1990. He lost his job and was sent to a “re-education” camp. In 1999, union representatives from Holland visited him in Cuba, and Pope John Paul’s trip to the communist island provided a little breathing room, too. But it didn’t last.

Before the Summit of the Americas, Alvarez Ramos and several other exiled Cuban workers came to Washington to speak at a conference sponsored by U.S. labor, the National Endowment for Democracy and human rights groups.

Eugenia Kemble, executive director of the Albert Shanker Institute that presses for labor rights, notes that the AFL-CIO helped the Solidarity movement in Poland and budding unions throughout the former Soviet empire even as unions in European democracies ignored them.

“Right now, our main agenda is drawing attention to the lack of rights and the imprisonment of workers in Cuba and making sure that these rights are involved in any policy changes,” she said.

Randall Garton, who helped independent unions in eastern Europe, noted: “One thing we’ve learned is that Cuba has a very, very effective police-state operation.”

Unions in democratic countries shouldn’t recognize Cuba’s so-called labor unions, which are controlled by the Communist Party and serve as a mouthpiece for Cuba’s rulers.

“What happens is that many of those folks, from the left, have this romantic notion and excuse everything that happens in Cuba,” said Alvarez Ramos, 61, who now lives in Barcelona.

Alvarez Ramos’ father was killed fighting the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s. Then came Castro’s revolution and a young nation’s hopes have turned into a 50-year nightmare.

“Fidel made Batista’s dictatorship seem like a small thing,” he said. “At least back then people could come and go, and they didn’t have to ask anybody for permission.”

Myriam Marquez is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Readers may write to her via e-mail at mmarquez@miamiherald.com.