Cuban dissidents fast to press for release of political prisoners
Wednesday, April 7, 2004
HAVANA, Cuba (AFP): About 30 opponents of
President Fidel Castro launched a 24-hour fast Tuesday seeking the release of
more than 300 Cuban political prisoners, including 75 who were rounded up and
jailed in a crackdown a year ago. In a
cramped flat in the El Vedado neighborhood, seated under a huge red, white and
blue Cuban flag bearing the names of 75 dissidents sentenced to lengthy jail
terms last year family and friends demanded freedom for loved ones they say
are held in dismal conditions. Castro's
crackdown has brought condemnations from the United States and European Union.
"My husband Nelson is being harshly punished in Santiago de Cuba; I don't get
conjugal visits, they do not allow me to phone, he was in the hospital and
they packed him off in a rush back to a special confinement cell in jail,"
said Gloria Leal, wife of Nelson Aguiar Ramirez, president of the outlawed
Cuban Orthodox Party. The dissident is serving a 13-year jail term.
Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque has claimed an international "campaign of
exaggeration and lies" is being carried out over the 75 whom he insisted last
week "are treated with respect and no one bothers them. Their physical and
psychological well-being is looked after."
When she heard the minister's remarks, jailed economist Marta Beatriz Roque,
the only woman among the jailed 75, "decided not to accept the visit or the
food to which she was entitled" last week, dissident physician Francisco
Piruano said. Roque, former president of the
Association to Promote Civil Society, was jailed for 20 years. She is in the
prisoners' ward at Carlos Finlay Military Hospital in Havana for treatment of
diabetes and heart trouble. On April 1, for
the first time in more than a decade, with a UN vote on its human rights
record looming, Cuba partly opened two jails to the media amid a rising
international criticism of prison conditions.
The visit was limited to two prison hospitals however.
Cuba has rejected the idea of a visit by the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights to the lone Communist-ruled country in the Americas. The last time the
International Red Cross visited Cuba's jails was in 1988 and they had been
closed for more than a decade to any foreign visitors.
Prominent dissident Oswaldo Paya meanwhile is urging the UN human rights
commission in Geneva to condemn the Cuban government in a vote this month,
arguing that not to do so "would be condemning the Cuban people."
"To keep silent or justify on this commission the lack of and the violation of
many rights in my country ... indeed would be condemning the Cuban people,"
Paya said in a letter. Paya, who won the
European Parliament's Sakharov prize in 2002, has spearheaded the Varela
Project, collecting 25,000 signatures seeking a referendum on political and
economic reforms, and called for the release of all political prisoners. Cuba
has rejected the request. The Varela Project
petition requests a referendum on five points -- freedom of expression and
association, freedom of enterprise, amnesty for political prisoners, a new
electoral law and, if the referendum is approved, elections within a year.
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