WASHINGTON – When awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush in 2007, Dr. Oscar Biscet had a scheduling conflict, being in a Cuban prison. At the White House ceremony, Bush called him a “dangerous man in the same way that Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi were dangerous.” It was not until three years later in a dark cell that another prisoner told him what the citation read that day had said.
Michael GersonRecently, unexpectedly, Biscet was allowed by the Cuban regime to travel to the Bush Institute in Dallas and finally receive the award from Bush’s hands. Biscet explains this as part of the regime’s effort to create “the impression of change.” That impression was dimmed a bit by the humiliating searches he was subjected to at the airport on his departure. Knowing the police would rummage through his suitcase, Biscet, who spent 12 of his 54 years in Cuban jails, left a surprise: a Cuban flag covering his belongings.
Biscet’s first offense was exposing deception at the heart of Cuban health care, the regime’s main source of revolutionary pride. In the early 1990s, Biscet (an internist and medical teacher) began documenting “the mix between politics and medicine” that kept child mortality rates in Cuba so low. The government pushed hospitals and doctors to pressure women with problem pregnancies to abort, to post better statistics. “It is all about appearances,” he explained.
The largest question since President Obama’s opening to the Cuban government: Are we seeing changes that are more than appearances? The Castro government seems interested in freeing up some economic space for small and medium-sized businesses (though not for professionals such as doctors and lawyers). But jobs in tourism are rewarded to regime favorites and cronies, including former military.
There is no indication that the regime is opening social or political space. To the contrary, the Communist Party is overcompensating in its revolutionary zeal, including an old-fashioned diatribe by Fidel Castro against Obama and American imperialism.