http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/07/cuba_a_new_crac.htmlIn Cuba, as part of what today's Le Monde is calling "the most important operation against dissidents since 2003," 18 oppositionists to the regime of Fidel Castro (left) were arrested last Friday as they were making their way toward a demonstration in front of the French embassy in Havana to demand the liberation of political prisoners (they were also protesting the French move toward normalization of relations between Paris and Havana, symbolized by the invitation of Cuban government representatives to the official French observance of Bastille Day-- which one should note was a remarkable lapse of taste, since La Bastille was where political prisoners were detained before the French Revolution.) According to PEN's Writers in Prison Bulletin, 68 political prisoners arrested on Castro's orders in March-April of 2003 and sentenced to prison are still in jail -- and 31 of them are journalists or librarians.
One of those prisoners, the economist Marta Beatriz Roque (left)-- founder and president of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba (APSC)-- was released from prison yesterday on health grounds after a hunger strike, Le Monde reported. The 60-year-old dissident "was forced to sleep on the floor on two pages of newspaper," an APSC spolesman said -- Roque suffers from diabetes, hypertension, and cardiac insufficiency. Roque had been sentenced in 2003 to 20 years in prison under Article 91 (which deals with "acts against the independence or territorial integrity of the state"), principally for her work in setting up a website that reported unfavourably on the Cuban economy, said PEN. Roque had already served a previous prison sentence from 1997 to 2000.
The APSC is an umbrella group of 365 independent, non-governmental, civil society groups within Cuba. This coalition sponsored an unprecedented May 20 assembly of some 200 dissidents (left) to discuss how to bring real democracy to Cuba -- European lawmakers and journalists who had gone to Cuba to observe this meeting were expelled from the country before they could attend it.
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