Orwellian Human Rights Day

George Orwell should be living at this hour. The perversion of truth, distortion of language and the denial of reality that he described in his prophetic novel "1984" were perfectly illustrated in Cuba Monday.

The Castro-Communist dictatorship chose Dec. 10, universally celebrated as Human Rights Day, to announce that it will sign two U.N. human rights covenants that protect economic, social, cultural, civil and political freedom.

The announcement followed a crackdown on dissidents denounced by Elizardo Sanchez, head of the banned Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation of Cuba. Mr. Sanchez has spent so much time in Fidel Castro's jails that the secret police, the dreaded MINT, no longer bothers to arrest him for speaking out. Mr. Sanchez, a former professor at the university of Havana, said that more than 30 dissidents have been arrested in recent weeks, including one group whose members were beaten and dragged away when police broke into a church.

The Cuban government also showed what it really thinks about human rights by arresting 10 Spanish women who traveled to Cuba to show their solidarity with persecuted human rights activists. Reuters news agency reported that the women, one of whom is a Barcelona city councillor, joined a march of "The Ladies in White," a group of women who are seeking the release of their imprisoned sons and husbands. According to the news agency, the Spanish activists were immediately arrested and held at their hotel awaiting expulsion from Cuba.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said the decision to sign the U.N. covenants followed a "radical change" by the new U.N. Human Rights Council, which has removed Cuba from the list of countries that are on the black list. What has happened, in fact, is that the disgraced and discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission has been replaced by an organization that has a different name, but is equally flawed.

Both the human rights council and the commission it replaced are dominated by countries that are violators of human rights. The United States recognized that the new council was no better than the old commission and did not seek membership.

Mr. Orwell described Cuba to perfection in "Animal Farm," his allegory on communist dictatorship. Mr. Sanchez pointed out two other examples of Orwellian repression by the Castro dictatorship: A ban on the distribution of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948 as a global reaction to Nazi atrocities in World War II; and Amnesty International's designation of 67 dissidents as "prisoners of conscience," which gives Cuba one of the worst human rights records in the world.