Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recently nominated Cuban political prisoner Dr. Oscar Biscet for the Nobel Peace Prize. “Dr. Biscet is a man of courage and dignity,” he wrote, “waging a relentless and self-sacrificing struggle for universal human rights and freedom.”
It’s way past time for this nomination. Human-rights groups and especially black “leaders” have a long and shameful history if ignoring Castroite Stalinism and apartheid. To wit:
When a smitten Jesse Jackson yelled, “Viva Che!– Viva Fidel!” alongside the latter at the University of Havana in 1984 with Jeremiah Wright (among Jackson’s entourage) clapping wildly from the sidelines, the world’s longest suffering black political prisoner languished in a torture-chamber within walking distance of the celebration.
“N*gger!” taunted his Castroite jailers between tortures. “We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” Shortly before his death in 2006, this prisoner, the heroic Eusebio Penalver, granted this writer an interview.
“For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell,” Eusebio recalled. “That’s 4 feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide.” Eusebio Penalver suffered longer in Castro’s prisons than Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa.
Shortly after, a smitten Congressional Black Caucus visited with Raul Castro in Dec. 2009, and returned hailing him as “one of the most amazing human beings we’ve ever met.” They went on: “Castro is a very engaging, down-to-earth and kind man, someone who I would favor as a neighbor.” Perhaps they were unaware of the black human-rights activist Orlando Zapata-Tamayo, who was beaten comatose by his Castroite jailers and left with a life-threatening fractured skull and Subdural Hematoma. A year later, Zapata-Tamayo was dead after a lengthy hunger-strike. Samizdats smuggled out of Cuba by eye-witnesses report that while gleefully kicking and bludgeoning Tamayo, his Castroite jailers yelled: “Worthless N*gger!–Worthless Peasant!”
Shortly before an enamored Charlie Rangel engulfed Fidel Castro in a mighty bear hug in Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist church (as the audience shook the rafters with bellows of “VIVA-FIDEL!—VIVA FIDEL!”), black human-rights activist, Dr. Oscar Biscet, was grabbed by Castro’s KGB-trained police, thrown in a dungeon, and kicked, spat upon, and burned with cigarettes. A Cuban doctor, Oscar Elias Biscet suffers a sentence of 25 years in Castro’s torture chambers as I write. Essentially, his “crime” involves reciting the works of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the UN Declaration of Human Rights in a Cuban public square. This “crime” was greatly compounded by Dr. Biscet specifically denouncing the Castro regime’s policy of forced abortions.
“Here in this dark box where they make me live, I will be resisting until freedom for my people is gained,” declared Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, in the vain hope that news agencies might report the plight of on of Cuba’s political prisoners.
“My dad explained to me he is in prison for a cause, the cause is human rights, rights for Cubans. Also, for the right of that child which hasn’t even been born yet.” (Dr. Biscet’s daughter, Winnie.)
This latter “crime” goes a long way towards explaining why you’ve probably never heard of Dr. Oscar Biscet in the mainstream media. Yet in November 2007, President Bush awarded Dr. Biscet the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The award was presented to Dr. Biscet’s son and daughter who reside in freedom in the U.S. The ceremony was virtually blacked out by the MSM.
“I would like to thank President Bush for his great generosity in granting this medal and in helping us call attention to the plight of my husband and all other Cuban political prisoners and in trying to help their release,” said Elsa Morejon, Dr. Biscet’s wife, during the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony for her husband.
Compare this with Nelson Mandela two months after President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom:
If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America! They don’t care for human beings! What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight and who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust!
Nelson Mandela was convicted by an independent judiciary in a trial open to the international press, any and all human-rights organizations, and was described by his own authorized biographer, Anthony Sampson, as “properly conducted…the judge, Mr. Justice Quartus de Wet, [was] scrupulously fair.” Mandela suffered his sentence 8000 miles from U.S. shores.
Penalver, Tamayo, Biscet and thousands upon thousands of other Cubans were convicted in secret, by regime judges, in a judicial system copied from Stalin. They suffered their sentences 90 miles from the U.S., with press bureaus, including CNN, NPR , ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, Al Jazeera and Reuters, within walking distance or a short cab ride from their cells. As mentioned, Dr. Biscet still suffers in such a cell.
But I’ll make a wild guess here: you’re familiar with the injustices against Nelson Mandela; you’ve read and heard endlessly about the terrorist prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, but you have probably never even heard the names of these human-rights activists tortured by Castro, much less details of their suffering. Am I right?
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