Cuban dissidents languish in prison one year after crackdown

by Marie Sanz

Friday, March 19, 2004

HAVANA, Cuba (AFP): A year after one of the worst waves of repression Cuba has launched against dissidents, 75 opponents of the communist state languish in prison, many ailing, as Cuba defies international criticism.

Rounded up and jailed from March 18 last year, the 75 dissidents were handed prison terms of up to 28 years after being quickly found guilty of offenses against state security.

Gisela Delgado, the wife of prominent dissident Hector Palacios and who runs the Independent Libraries project, told AFP: "we family members pay a very high price." Her husband was jailed for 25 years.

"We live in permanent anguish," she said referring to the ill health of her 62-year-old husband, who was recently hospitalized to have his gall-bladder removed.

"I never would have thought my husband would be convicted like that, in that totally false fashion, accused of being a mercenary," she said bitterly, recalling the day of his arrest, with sharpshooters on the roof and police blocking off the neighborhood.

The crackdown "was an act of pure vengeance, punishing the peaceful opposition. And with that, the government did not change the country's situation, political or economic," said Elizardo Sanchez, who leads the Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

"Social discontent is on the rise. Poverty, unhappiness and hopelessness are increasing," Sanchez, who has served eight years in jail himself, told AFP.

Sanchez said he was surprised by what he deemed the extreme line taken against these dissidents including placing them in isolation cells infested with insects and rats.

"A dozen of these prisoners are in their 60s and about 20 of them are gravely ill, the health of at least 12 of them incompatible with prison and they should be freed immediately," Sanchez said.

No international organization has been allowed into Cuba's prisons since a visit was paid by the International Committee of the red Cross in 1988.

In Geneva Wednesday, Cuba defied the United Nations human rights commission by rejecting a UN expert's criticism of abuse in the country and barring her from the country.

"She has ended up acting as an instrument at the service of the US government," Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told the annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

The expert, Catherine Chanet, released a report last month calling for the release of the 75 dissidents. Perez Roque said Cuba "does not accept" a request that Chanet visit the country, even though the demand is regarded by human rights groups as a moderate response.

It was made in a resolution presented to the Commission last year by three Latin American countries -- Uruguay, Peru and Nicaragua -- which was approved by the 53-member UN body.

EU countries and the US had wanted a tougher resolution.

In her report, Chanet said she had "particularly alarming" information about the "very trying conditions from the physical and psychological point of view" in which the detainees were being held.

In Cuba, dissidents' families are not upbeat about chances for clemency.

Miriam Leiva, an independent journalist and wife of pro-reform economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, 62, wote in an open letter to her husband she is unable to send that: "for thinking out loud, you have been made a martyr. They are so afraid of ideas ... they are trying to break your will and that is why they are torturing you mentally and physically, they confine you to inhumane cells."

Authorities "are not going to free them or pardon them; they really have hatred for them," added Gisela Delgado.

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