Getting to know Cuba's Four

Published Tuesday, April 6, 1999, in the Miami Herald

RAUL RIVERO

Getting to know Cuba's Four

Raul Rivero is an independent journalist working in Havana. Cuban government officials have warned him that under the new gag law he faces prison for writing about Cuba in the foreign press.

Havana -- The trials of the two Salvadoran terrorists, the development of the gag law, the debate in Geneva on human rights, the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia, the baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and a Cuban all-star team and the concerts in the Karl Marx theater which brought dozens of North Americans here haven't been able to divert people's attention. The question is still being asked:

``What about the case of the jailed Working Group of Four?''

People want to know who they are. They have an interest in the plight of the three men and one woman who were prosecuted in a run-down courtroom. They want information about The Four, because the official government press calls them counter revolutionaries without a country and cites only the title and fragments of the document that they wrote, which led the government to arrest them and send them to prison. Merely hearing the title -- ``The Homeland Belongs to Us All'' -- causes uneasiness.

So people on the street repeat the title and cautiously look for someone who might have a copy. The statement and its links with declarations of Jose Marti (one of Cuba's founding fathers) causes some people to say it with pleasure.

The three men and the woman are frozen in the memories of those who saw parts of the trial broadcasted. But nobody can live only in a memory, nobody can be reduced to just a succession of data and adjectives.

One of the prisoners, Rene Gomez Manzano, tall and athletic, is a silent and cordial man who no longer fits into the current schemes of Cuban life. He is discreet with the healthy custom of speaking in a low voice. He is a conversationalist of the highest quality -- agreeable, cultured and smart enough to value silence and to listen attentively. He speaks English, Russian and French with ease. His specialty has been law although many believe his passion is politics.

Another of the prisoners, Felix Bonne is a scientist and professor and with many contacts with whom he was popular. He was liked by students in the classrooms and laboratories of the world of physics not to mention in his home and on the street, for he was an affable and smiling man. He always seemed to have just arrived back from visiting his beloved Santiago in eastern Cuba.

Bonne is direct and pragmatic, and the group of professors that he put together and directed always maintained a familiar relationship with him.

He is demonstrative, but when he is presented as ``the carcass of professor Bonne'' he throws a glance of reproach and timidity.

The other male of The Four is Vladimiro Roca, alert and suave. He is able to concentrate superbly and greatly values his time. He meditates and studies with care, examining the situation with all his senses and great intelligence. He enjoys jokes and handles irony very well. He also is persistent and can become stubborn. He is an educated individual, speaks well and knows Cuban history thoroughly. He is able to be warm and close in his personal relationships.

Marta Beatriz Roque is simply Marta. Behind the figures and the economic calculations and their predictions, there is a woman who writes verses and takes refuge in music, at which she is quite good. She is sweet and yet stubborn, and she listens to her questioners and takes notes. She always is reading something, possibly some esoteric document or maybe just a love poem.

She is obsessed with gathering information and understanding it. She uses lots of diminutives and still has the capacity to amaze listeners.

These are my observations about The Four with whom I've become acquainted during the past few years in my work as a journalist; I'm offering a view that is partial, positive and without doubts about them. I'm providing a personal portrait of people who are far superior to their detractors. Their defects and errors already have been singled out by enemies. Precisely because they have, I'm providing some balance.