By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- After decades of strongly supporting Cuban President Fidel Castro, European leftists are increasingly breaking with him, eroding Cuba's image, exposing the island to foreign pressures and lending legitimacy to dissidents.
What a turn-around.
Many people have criticized Castro over the years, but seldom anyone like Regis Debray or the Dutch branch of Pax Christi.
Debray, the leftist French intellectual whose writings burnished Castro's image as a world icon of romantic revolution in the 1960s, calls Castro a ``dictator'' and worse in his most recent book.
And the Dutch human rights group, regarded as leftist when it worked in Central America in the 1980s, wrote a critical report on Cuba that helped push Europe to toughen its stand on Havana.
``The left has become gradually aware that Cuba is a sort of dictatorship,'' said Erik Laan, Latin America staffer for Dutch Pax Christi, a human rights group of the Roman Catholic Church with offices in 25 developed nations.
Overall, Castro has been doing well in Europe since the collapse of communism in 1989, warming up trade and diplomatic relations, luring tourists and investors, and basking in the continent's rebuff of the U.S. Helms-Burton law.
But the shift in the European leftists' image of Castro is important because of their dominant influence on the continent's intellectual life, the news media, the nongovernment groups that work in poor countries and the official agencies that distribute money for aid programs.
``It's very easy to find support for dissidents among foreign rightist and conservative groups. But that doesn't interest us as much as support from the foreign left,'' Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya told Pax Christi recently.
Pax Christi's preliminary report on the Cuban human rights situation after a visit last year was credited with raising EU knowledge and concern over abuses -- and in the end changing EU attitudes on Cuba.
``If it had not come from a credible leftist group, that report would never have been read, would never have had the impact it did,'' said a Spanish Socialist who is a member of the European Parliament based in Brussels.
After reading Pax Christi's report, EU officials agreed to take a tough position on negotiations linking a new EU commercial pact with Cuba to human rights improvements, a top EU official said. The EU broke off the talks after Cuba rejected the EU conditions in February.
Laan prefers to call his group ``progressive'' but acknowledges that it achieved a reputation as leftist as it denounced human rights abuses by right-wing governments in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in the 1980s.
Changes in the European left's rhetoric on Cuba have also been significant, helping to weaken popular support for Castro among common Europeans.
``In the old days, a pro-Cuba demonstration might have drawn a few thousand here. Now it's just a few hundred, and no one listens to them,'' said Gunner Beeth, a former State of Florida trade representative in Brussels.
`Sex tourists'
Regis Debray's latest book, Praise Be Our Lords -- A Political Education, published in May, traces his growing disillusionment with the revolution he praised in the 1960s. Today, he writes, sex tourists have replaced the Latin American leftist revolutionaries who once flocked to Cuba to learn from its selfless society and guerrilla training camps.
He compares Castro to Benito Mussolini and calls him a ``megalomaniac [who] . . . attends to every detail of the ant farm, the improvised little kingdom he would smash without warning if it ever tried to change his line.''
Showing its anger, Havana has orchestrated an international campaign portraying Debray as a weak-kneed liberal who, when arrested in Bolivia in the 1960s, betrayed the whereabouts of guerrilla leader Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara.
Worse criticism of Castro came from Italy's once powerful, now fractured Communist Party, which mustered only 200 people for a pro-Castro demonstration in Rome when the Cuban president arrived Nov. 16. Emanuele Macaluso, one of the top moderate communist theorists, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera that Castro is ``still a fascinating strongman, though it must be said that he's a dictator.''
A headline in Manifesto, a newspaper run by communist hard-liners, called Castro A tyrant, but Different, and the more moderate Liberacion said in an editorial that Castro was trying to keep alive ``a candle that died years ago.''
Such criticism appears to be undermining Castro's ability to dismiss domestic critics as disloyal opponents financed by the CIA.
``The romance of the revolution is over,'' said Claudio Sintore, a Rome official of the former Communist Party. ``I'm reading more of what the dissidents in Cuba say, and believing more of what they say.''
Most Italians still oppose the U.S. embargo on Cuba and the Helms-Burton law designed to slow foreign investments in Cuba, Sintore added, ``but not so many people now defend Fidel when someone says they want democracy.''
Copyright © 1996 The Miami Herald