By ANITA SNOW
Associated Press Writer
Apr 4, 2003
HAVANA (AP) -- Cuba's communist government tried the first of 80 dissidents
in hearings that stretched late into the night, moving forward with a campaign
to steamroll a growing opposition movement.
While the relatives of those tried on Thursday anxiously awaited word on sentences, more trials were scheduled for Friday as authorities pressed its harshest crackdown on the opposition in recent times.
Prosecutors were seeking life sentences for at least 12 of the defendants in the trials, which local human rights activists predicted would be wrapped up by the end of Monday. Although sentences here generally are issued two weeks after trial, the defendants' relatives said they believed the sentences would be announced within days.
International media and foreign diplomats were kept out of the hearings.
"This is a judicial Tiananmen," said opposition member Manuel Cuesta Morua, referring to the 1989 Chinese military assault on pro-democracy student protesters in Tiananmen Square.
Local human rights activists said that those going to court Friday included the poet and well-known independent journalist Raul Rivero. He was being tried alongside Ricardo Gonzalez, who recently launched the first independent general interest magazine of its kind in communist Cuba.
Prosecutors were seeking 20 years for Rivero and life for Gonzalez, said Elizardo Sanchez, whose Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation is monitoring the trials.
The Committee to Protect Journalists sent a letter to President Fidel Castro this week asking him to free the two men, along with 25 other independent journalists it said were arrested in last month's roundup of dissidents.
The CPJ asked that the confiscated computers, research materials and other equipment seized from the reporters' homes during the crackdown be returned. It also asked that Cuban authorities "respect international guarantees for freedom of expression and cease harassing the independent press."
Leaders of independent labor unions and opposition political parties, as well as activists involved in the pro-democracy Varela Project movement, were among those rounded up over five days beginning March 18. Cuban authorities accuse them of working with U.S. diplomats on the island to subvert Castro's government.
Although Cuban authorities publicly announced the arrests and labeled many of the defendants traitors, they have not commented on the trials or disclosed specific charges. But court documents provided by relatives showed that many dissidents are being tried for state security crimes under laws that prohibit Cubans from working with foreign powers to undermine the socialist system.
The crackdown ended several years of relative government tolerance for the opposition. It began when Cuban officials criticized the head of the American mission in Havana, James Cason, for his active support of the island's dissidents.
Rising Cuba-U.S. tensions have coincided with a string of hijackings by Cubans trying to leave the communist-run island.
On Wednesday, gunmen forced a Cuban ferry to head toward Florida; the boat returned to Cuba Thursday morning and the hijackers continued to hold the ferry and its passengers hostages. Two airliners were recently hijacked to Key West, Fla.: one on March 19 and a second on Tuesday.
As the trials opened on Thursday, nine U.S. senators favoring an end to American restrictions on trade with and travel to Cuba released a letter expressing their concerns about the trials.
"Unless corrected, the recent actions of the Cuban government will only undermine efforts to expand contacts between the two countries," members of the Senate Cuba Working Group wrote in a letter to Dagoberto Rodriguez, chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington.
The State Department said the proceedings amounted to a "kangaroo court."
"While the rest of the hemisphere has moved toward greater freedom, the anachronistic Cuban government appears to be retreating into Stalinism," department spokesman Philip Reeker said in Washington.
Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, said the crackdown seemed aimed to coincide with the war in Iraq.
"It is truly shameful that the Cuban government is opportunistically exploiting the world's inattention to try to crush domestic dissent," Vivanco said in a statement from New York.
Trials were also were being held for dissidents from other parts of the country.