Concilio remains 'a dream full of promise' feared by Cuba's regime.
Susana Barciela. Published Monday, August 6, 2001 in
The Miami Herald
Most of the lawyers applauding Leonel Morejón Almagro today have no
inkling of the beatings, mental and physical, that he took trying to defend
human rights in a place where the law faithfully serves only the police state. A
Cuban lawyer, he was kicked out of his profession for representing dissidents
all too well. Then, he pulled off the unimaginable: joining some 130 disparate,
dissident groups into one coalition called Concilio Cubano.
"Concilio occurred to me as a way to unite all Cubans on a common
platform, so that we could push for freedom in a democratic Cuba,'' Morejón
explained recently. The idea remains "a dream full of promise, the ideal
most feared by Cuba's government.''
But that gets ahead of the story.
Today Morejón, 36, is in Chicago to accept the prestigious
International Human Rights Award of the American Bar Association's Litigation
Section. Only the presentation comes four years late -- Morejón was
sitting in a dank Cuban jail when the ABA made the award in 1997.
The recognition is fitting tribute to how far he's traveled since, and how
much groundwork he laid for Cuban dissidents who still dream of an unbound
future.
Morejón's dissident career began innocently enough. In Havana, he was
working by day and going to law school at night when a 1986 government decree
apparently legalized private associations. Taking it at face value, Morejón
started NaturPaz, a advocacy group for peace and the environment.
Before long he was picked up for questioning at Villa Marista, the notorious
state security prison. It didn't matter that he was a loyal member of the
communist youth group or that his uncle had died in Angola.
A letter Morejón had circulated in support of a U.S.-Soviet
nuclear-arms moratorium, his interrogator told him, was an attack on Cuba's
regime.
He was booted from the youth group, threatened with jail and accused of
being a CIA spy -- though he never had met an American. State security agents
infiltrated his group. It virtually disintegrated -- foreshadowing what would
happen again, only worse, years later.
Despite more trips to Villa Marista, he made it through law school. "My
naiveté was already dead,'' Morejón says. "That's when I had
the idea of using the law against them.''
Of course, the "law'' in Cuba, typical of totalitarian systems, bends
to whatever the government needs to maintain its control over people.
Technically, for example, only the state can sell goods. Yet a thriving black
market permits Cubans to survive. Buying and selling beef privately, however, is
illegal. So is buying any item of dubious origin. "But everything in Cuba
is of dubious origin,'' Morejón says. "Everything is illegal.''
In the 1990s Morejón defended many balseros -- rafters caught trying
to leave Cuba without government permission, as well as high-profile dissidents.
He also befriended like-minded lawyers, notably René Gómez
Manzano, who later was one of the Group of Four jailed for authoring The
Homeland Belongs to All of Us. Gómez, who remains in Cuba, was also
recognized by the ABA along with Morejón.
In 1995, Morejón was barred from practicing law. Devastated, he put
his energies into Concilio Cubano, riding his bike from house to house, urging
dissidents to put aside divisive egos and disagreements and to focus on what
they all agreed on. The group even pulled off a secret vote for its leaders,
electing Morejón as Concilio's national head and agreeing to meet in
Havana on Feb. 24, 1996. Fearing the prospect of unified opposition, state
security used every evil trick, ultimately fracturing the group. Morejón,
like others, was arrested days before the event. But not before security goons
made his life unbearable -- in one case planting rumors that so upset his
hypertensive wife that she miscarried.
Concilio never met; the Cuban Air Force shot down two small Brothers to the
Rescue planes that day, murdering four South Floridians.
Convicted of contempt for authority, Morejón spent 15 hard months in
prison. Once out, state security set at driving him out of Cuba, recruiting even
family members to destroy his marriage.
Finally, in 1999 the Morejón family arrived here and resettled in
Lansing, Mich. There, with his wife and two kids -- one born soon after arrival
-- they've adjusted to new lives, even as Morejón's passion for a free
Cuba remains intact.
He's worked in everything from an auto-parts factory to cleaning floors; he
studies English at the local college and is determined to return to law school
and practice here again.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 
