Adolfo Fernández Saínz

Mr. Fernández Saínz, who is serving a 15-year sentence, is one of 75 journalists, economists, librarians, human rights workers and doctors arrested in Cuba last March and later convicted. That crackdown jailed most of the nation's dissidents, whose supposed crimes include writing for Web sites based abroad, setting up independent libraries that offer books by the likes of Vaclav Havel and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and collecting signatures, in accordance with the Cuban Constitution, to petition for a referendum on fundamental reforms.

Cuba is not content to deprive these men — and one woman, the prominent economist Martha Beatriz Roque — of their liberty for what will be, in some cases, the rest of their lives. They are being held in hellish conditions, in many cases as far from their families as Cuba allows. They are in rat- and insect-infected cells, get starvation rations and are forced to share space with violent criminals or to suffer in solitary confinement. Their average sentence is 19 years. Some of the prisoners' wives have been warned that they will lose their children if they continue to protest their husbands' detentions.

Sadly, foreign criticism of the Cuban government's repression has
been muted. Last year at the United Nations Human Rights Commission, which meets annually in March and April, the members voted 31-to-15 against a resolution criticizing the crackdown. Instead, the commission approved a mild statement calling for a human rights monitor to visit the island; Cuba has simply not let her in.

The near appeasement of Fidel Castro is in large part due to the outside world's fury at Washington these days, which the Communist regime masterfully exploits. The U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva is again considering whether to condemn the Castro regime. The continued imprisonment of Cuba's brave independent thinkers is a totalitarian crackdown by a brutal dictatorship. President Bush's unpopularity aside, the international community must recognize this truth.