Remember Jimmy Carter’s much ballihooed trip to Cuba? The Castro regime gave him such free access to all points of view that he could meet with dissidents. Well,… Jimmy did a fine job for Castro’s secret police. Basically, he smoked out and identified all the dissidents so they could be arrested and jailed for decades.
Jimmy ought to stay home and build houses for the poor instead of assisting dictators in the suppression of the people’s voices.
The following report is from Reuters:
HAVANA (Reuters) - Communist Cuba sentenced on Monday at least 36 of 78 dissidents charged with opposing President Fidel Castro to 12 to 27 years in prison in the toughest political crackdown in decades.
In a clear message to the Bush administration that Cuba will not tolerate its efforts to build up a dissident movement on the island, 14 courts across the country convicted the dissidents of “working with a foreign power to undermine the government” and gave them sentences that ranged from 12 to 27 years in jail.
The island’s best known dissident, poet and journalist Raul Rivero, 57, and economists Martha Beatriz Roque and Oscar Espinosa Chepe got 20 year sentences, the Cuban Human Rights Commission said.
“This is so arbitrary for a man whose only crime is to write what he thinks,” Rivero’s wife Blanca Reyes told reporters after the sentence was given behind closed doors. “What they found on him was a tape recorder, not a grenade.”
Prosecutors had asked for life sentences for a dozen of the 78 jailed dissidents, among them Roque, leading dissident Hector Palacios, opposition labor activist Pedro Pablo Alvarez, and Ricardo Gonzalez, editor of Cuba’s only dissident magazine. But Palacios, 62, and Alvarez were sentenced to 25 years and Gonzalez to 20 years.
In other sentences on Monday, journalist Hector Maseda received 20 years, activists Osvaldo Alfonso and Regis Iglesias 18 years, Marcelo Lopez 15 years and Efren Fernandez 12 years.
Independent journalist Omar Rodriguez Saludes was given 27 years in prison, the longest sentence.
The trial of civil disobedience advocate Oscar Elias Biscet began on Monday in the Havana neighborhood of La Vibora where police cordoned off the court house.
The crackdown began on March 18 with arrests and house searches. That was followed last week by one-day trials in court rooms filled with Communist Party members and security agents while only three close relatives of the prisoners could attend, the wives said.
In all, 78 people were arrested and 71 have been convicted while seven trials are still underway. The Cuban government does not announce sentences but the Cuban Human Rights Commission was able to gather information on 36 sentences on Monday, most from relatives.
Half of the 78 dissidents on trial had organized a signature drive to petition for reforms to Cuba’s one-party socialist state. The effort was known as the Varela Project, which united Cuba’s small, divided dissident movement into the first major internal challenge to Castro’s rule in four decades.
Government informants who had infiltrated dissident groups testified against the prisoners.
“The trial was unfair. He met his lawyer five minutes before it started and had no time to study the charges,” said Claudia Marquez, wife of Osvaldo Alfonso.
The wives have three days to appeal, but said they had little hope the sentences would be shortened.
“These terms were dictated by President Castro. In Cuba there is only one voice,” said Reyes.
U.S. diplomats were surprised to learn that Manuel David Orrio, who had led a meeting of opposition journalists at Cason’s house last month, testified against Rivero and said in court testimony that he was a state security agent.
WORLD CRITICISM OF TRIALS
Western diplomats and foreign journalists were barred from the trials, which were criticized in Europe. International rights organizations accused Castro of trying to knock out his political opponents while world attention was focused on Baghdad.
The Bush administration stepped up active support for the dissidents, who would meet in the residence of the top U.S. diplomat in Havana, James Cason.
The U.S. government called on the Cuban government to release the dissidents.
“The regime’s actions, we believe, are an appalling act of intimidation against those who seek freedom and democratic change in Cuba. The international community is united in its condemnation of this most egregious act of political repression in decades,” said State Department spokesman Philip Reeker.
Human Rights Watch said the sentences were unjustified and draconian. “Cuba is flouting fundamental human rights norms,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the New York-based organization’s executive director for the Americas.
Castro, in power since a 1959 revolution, denounced Cason last month for turning the American mission into an “incubator of counter-revolution” and threatened to close the U.S. Interests Section. Havana and Washington do not have formal diplomatic relations.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2524068