Author:
Publication: Yahoo News
Date: June 24, 2003
URL: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030623/1/3c1bz.html
With international pressure rising
over Cuba's latest crackdown on dissidents, the country's high court upheld
tough sentences against high- profile opponents of President Fidel Castro.
The court upheld the 20-year sentence
against prominent dissident journalist Raul Rivero, who was convicted along
with 74 other dissidents in April in a major roundup by the only one-party,
communist government in the Americas.
"It confirms our opinion of the
court, due to the political nature of these trials, that it was not going
to change the provincial court convictions," said Elizardo Sanchez Santacruz,
leader of the dissident Cuban National Committee for Human Rights and Reconciliation.
Among other prominent opponents
of the government whose convictions were upheld Monday were economists
Oscar Espinosa Chepe (20 years), Martha Beatriz Roque (20 years), Hector
Palacios (25 years) and journalist Osvaldo Alfonso Valdes (18 years).
"I am not surprised at all," Rivero's
wife Blanca Reyes told AFP. "It is an injustice so great, it has no name.
"It is an injustice done to a man
whose only crime is to have written what he believes," added Reyes.
Meanwhile, Clara Chepe Nunez, the
mother of Oscar Espinosa Chepe, released here a letter to UN chief Kofi
Annan, personally appealing for his intervention so that her son gets treatment
for a grave kidney condition in Havana.
"I ask him to appeal very urgently
to the government of Cuba so that my son ... gets the treatment he needs
for his cirrhosis, with full guarantees that he will live," said Chepe,
aged 95, pointing out to reporters that she is "in full command of her
mental faculties."
After his conviction Espinosa Chepe
was sent to a jail in Guantanamo province, after which he was moved to
a hospital there. The United States has spoken out specifically on his
case citing medical concerns.
Cuba's crackdown and sentencing
of the 75 to jail terms between six and 28 years sparked an international
outcry from governments, rights groups and even many politicians who in
the past had been sympathetic to Castro's more than 40-year rule.
Criticism from abroad continued
after Havana then held summary trials, convicted and executed three hijackers
of a passenger ferry who tried to flee to the United States.
The European Union earlier this
month decided to restrict political and cultural contacts with Cuba after
the crackdown.
Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez
Roque has said EU reprisals for Havana's crackdown on dissidents are "hypocritical
and opportunistic."
Perez Roque singled out the conservative
government of Spain's Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar -- a staunch US ally
-- as being the main culprit behind the sanctions.
Both the EU and United States have
said they are reviewing their relations with Cuba in light of the crackdown.
The United States does not have
full diplomatic ties with Cuba and has had a tough, full economic embargo
clamped on Havana for more than four decades.
European nations that have invested
heavily in Cuba's top industry, tourism, have always tried to keep economic
and diplomatic channels as open as possible, until now.
On June 9, US Secretary of State
Colin Powell told Latin American diplomats at an Organization of American
States summit that the United States has no intention of attacking Cuba.
Havana has said that after Iraq
it could be next in line for a US invasion, which Castro foes say the government
uses as a justification for continued crackdown.
