Misrule Without Law

"The rule of law has disappeared from the Cuban scene."

So read an indictment handed down last week by the International Commission of Jurists at the end of a detailed, 267-page study of Fidel Castro's Communist dictatorship. A widely respected, worldwide organization supported by 40,000 lawyers, judges and law professors in 90 countries, the commission was organized in 1952 in response to protests about the kangaroo trials then going on in Communist East Germany. Since then, working in Geneva, the commission has published nine reports,* each of them a model of painstaking thoroughness. As explained in an introduction by Commission Secretary-General Sir Leslie Munro, the New Zealander who served with distinction as president of the U.N. General Assembly in 1957-58, the Cuban study "extended over a period of years, and has involved not only the examination of official and unofficial documents, but as well the interviewing and careful examination of scores of witnesses."

The Batista Game. The report, entitled Cuba and the Rule of Law, produces Lawyer Fidel Castro himself as its first principal witness. Standing as his own counsel at his 1953 trial for attacking Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, Castro complained bitterly about the travesty of justice under Dictator Fulgencio Batista, particularly Batista's habit of amending the country's laws at will.

When Castro himself came to power, says the commission, the constitution of 1940, a model of democratic legislation, survived intact only twelve days. Then Castro's government suspended constitutional age and experience requirements for high government office (Castro was only 32). Three weeks later, on Feb. 7. 1959, Castro, like Batista, replaced the constitution with his own "Fundamental Law," giving himself and his Cabinet sweeping powers.

Even then, virtually every major step

Castro took along the road to Marxism--Leninism was expressly forbidden under his original Fundamental Law. His Cabinet obligingly amended it, giving Castro power to expropriate private property without interference by the courts, to settle all labor disputes and to appropriate funds without regard to a budget.

Fingerprint Signatures. Castro's vengeance against Batista made a mockery of Cuba's criminal law, says the commission. His first revolutionary tribunals condemned hundreds to die before firing squads without any semblance of the legal niceties Castro so eloquently espoused in his Moncada defense. The revolutionary tribunals are now a part of Cuban law, handing down Castro's justice against all those considered "counter-revolutionary."

The ghastly atmosphere of the tribunals comes through even in the report's painstaking telling. One of the commission's witnesses, a former Cuban lawyer, told of defending a man accused of simple bodily assault; during the trial a witness casually called the defendant a murderer. The defendant was convicted of murder without evidence and summarily executed. Said another commission witness: "I remember a case in which one member of the court was a Communist Party member, while the other four members were illiterate and had to sign with their fingerprints." A third witness described the trial of a man accused of attempting to murder Castro's favorite radio commentator, Jose Pardo Llada, who has since defected. "I went up to the prosecutor, Fernando Florez. I said that I assumed that he would now amend his conclusions because there had been no evidence to prove any clear case of guilt on the part of my client. He answered quickly that 'he had to be shot anyway as a measure of social health.' "

In the case of Armando Escoto, a respected lawyer who defended many of those hauled before the tribunals, another attorney reported: "Dr. Escoto challenged Fidel Castro himself on two successive occasions. After his encounter with Castro, Dr. Escoto was put in jail at Pinar del Rio. There I acted as his defense counsel . . . Our defense was ignored. The prosecutor and the members of the court bullied us and jeered that we were defeatists and counterrevolutionaries. Dr. Escoto was sentenced to death."

* On Hungary, Tibet (two), South Africa (two), Liberia, Tunisia, the Berlin Wall, Cuba.

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