Oscar Biset to be freed?

By Myles Kantor
National Review Online
Colaboración de Armando F. Mastrapa III
New York, La Nueva Cuba, Octubre 31, 2002

I was engaged in a war," James Meredith observes 40 years later. "I considered myself engaged in a war from day one."

On October 1 1962, the former Air Force staff sergeant and native of Kosciusko, Mississippi started classes at the University of Mississippi. That usually wouldn't have been historic, but Meredith was black in a Mississippi dedicated to educational apartheid.

It took federal troops to achieve Meredith's enrollment, which was just the start of his troubles. Many of Meredith's new classmates weren't elated about his presence and regularly let him know it.

"On Meredith's second night at the university," William Doyle writes in An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962, "a black-faced effigy labeled with 'Go back to Africa where you belong' was hung from a window facing his dorm and set ablaze." Over 500 students followed him on January 10, 1963 when he went to the library to study for exams.

Meredith endured this persecution and graduated in August 1963, going on to earn a law degree from Columbia in 1968. He recounted his experiences in Three Years in Mississippi (1966), which should be as famous as The Autobiography of Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice.

Meredith wrote of segregation, "The real problem is the power structure. The real problem is the system of law and the legal structure." Justice could not coexist with that system and structure.

Love of homeland animated Meredith's struggle to abolish Jim Crow and secure citizenship. "To me, Mississippi is the most beautiful country in the world, during all seasons," he wrote. It is where he lives today.

Near Mississippi, another man continues Meredith's pursuit of justice.

On February 25, 2000, black Cuban physician Oscar Elias Biscet was sentenced to three years' imprisonment for advocating Cuba's emancipation from totalitarianism. Also president of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, Dr. Biscet had been detained over 25 times by Fidel Castro's henchmen and often beaten. In August 1999, for instance, police kicked his ankles and burned a cigarette into his elbow.

The regime pressured Biscet to leave Cuba, but he refused. Like Meredith, he is a patriot and exemplifies the words of Cuban nationalist José Martí: "There is no solid ground but the ground on which one was born."

Biscet considers nationhood impossible without freedom. "While respect for human rights does not exist, a nation does not truly exist," he has said.

Biscet has also emphasized the particular suffering of black Cubans. He wrote to Coretta Scott King in January 1999:

In our country, discrimination exists against the black race, which together with the mestizo represent approximately 70% of the population. They have a very low political, economic, and judicial representation in contrast to the numerous, prevailing black penal population. This situation is never publicly manifested by the government but is a component of communism's subtle politics of segregation.

Juxtapose these words with black Fidelistas like Al Sharpton, who describes Castro as "absolutely awesome."

On October 31, Biscet will be released from the maximum-security prison where he has languished over 400 miles from his family. Now 41, he lost all of his molars in prison.

But prison hasn't broken Biscet, who shares Meredith's heroic tenacity. He has written to his wife (also persecuted by the regime) that "the evil one must acknowledge in me an eternal rival who will not lower his sword of justice."

Biscet won't become a free man on October 31. If he criticizes Castro or his functionaries, criticizes Communism, or gathers conscientiously with other Cubans, he can be charged with "crimes" like "disrespect," "enemy propaganda," and "illicit association." Like his countrymen, Biscet remains a captive of Castro's 43-year-long despotism.

Biscet has given no indication of being silent upon release. As he affirmed after the August 1999 beating, "I am a defender of human rights, and my activities will continue until the Cuban people achieve their rights and their freedom."

Hence Biscet's release is bittersweet; re-imprisonment is imminent if he does nothing more than speak his mind and be human. Biscet will be free only when the totalitarian machinery has been abolished.

"One day the South will recognize its real heroes," Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in "Letter from Birmingham Jail." "They will be the James Merediths, courageously and with a majestic sense of purpose facing jeering and hostile mobs and the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer."

Cuba will also recognize its real heroes, and Oscar Biscet will be among them.

- Myles Kantor is director of the Center for Free Emigration.

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