Seven Cuban dissidents were jailed for between 15 and 25 years yesterday for opposing the rule of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Community Party.They were convicted after trials from which foreign observers were barred but which were packed with party officials and security agents.
The accused were introduced to their lawyers five minutes before the trial began.
In a clear message to the Bush administration that Cuba will not tolerate its efforts to build up a dissident movement on the island, a court convicted the seven people of "working with a foreign power to undermine the government".
Seventy-one other people are also charged but their trials are not yet complete. Despite the tough sentences, the Havana Province Tribunal rejected prosecutors' requests for life sentences for leading dissident Hector Palacios and Ricardo Gonzalez, editor of Cuba's only dissident magazine, their wives said. Palacios was sentenced to 25 years and Gonzalez to 20 years.
Cuba's best-known opposition writer, poet and journalist, 57-year-old Raul Rivero, was sentenced to 20 years in jail.
"This is so arbitrary for a man whose only crime is to write what he thinks," his 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."
In other sentences yesterday, economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe got 20 years, Hector Maseda 20 years, Osvaldo Alfonso 18 years and Marcelo Lopez 15 years.
The crackdown began on March 18th with arrests and house searches. That was followed last week by one-day trials in courtrooms filled with Communist Party members and security agents while only three close relatives of the prisoners could attend, the wives said.
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.
She said the court reduced Alfonso's sentence from a life term sought by prosecutors because he accepted the charges and said in court that he had been manipulated by US diplomats.
The wives have three days to appeal, but said they were not hopeful the sentences could be shortened. "These terms were dictated by President Castro. In Cuba there is only one voice," said Reyes.
Western diplomats and foreign journalists were barred from the trials, which were criticised in Europe. The US State Department said the dissidents were being tried in "kangaroo courts". International human rights organizations accused Castro of trying to knock out his political opponents while world attention was focused on Baghdad.
Half of the 78 dissidents on trial had organised 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.
The Bush administration stepped up active support for the dissidents, who would meet in the residence of the top US diplomat in Havana, James Cason.
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 US Interests Section.
Havana and Washington do not have formal diplomatic relations. US 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.
Prosecutors have asked for life sentences for dissident economist Martha Beatriz Roque; opposition labour activist Pedro Pablo Alvarez; and civil disobedience advocate Oscar Elias Biscet. Those sentences are expected today. The trials went virtually unnoticed in Cuba. There was no mention in Cuba's state-run media and few Cubans were aware of the dissident round-up.
"The social and economic decay in Cuba is so great and the government knows there is widespread discontent," said Miriam Leiva, a former diplomat.