RIGHTS-CUBA: Group Accused of Sedition Awaiting Verdict

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Mar 2 1999 (IPS) - The four members of the internal dissident Working Group in Cuba began the wait for a verdict Tuesday, which is to be handed within the next 12 days, after a marathon 14-hour court hearing Monday.

Opposition sources, meanwhile, confirmed that around 10 of the people taken into custody to prevent possible incidents or demonstrations in support of the accused were released Tuesday.

Prosecutor Edelmira Pedriz asked for a six-year sentence for former air force pilot Vladimiro Roca, according to the head of the International Press Centre, Reynaldo Calveat.

She is seeking five-year sentences for the other three accused of “acts against state security, related to the crime of sedition” – Felix Bonne Carcases, Beatriz Roque and Rene Gonzalez Manzano.

Cuban law stipulates up to eight years in prison for the offence of which the four dissidents are accused, stated the official communique released Tuesday.

The court hearing took place behind closed doors and amidst tight security.

The four were arrested in July 1997, after circulating, in and outside of Cuba, a document titled “The Fatherland is for All” – a response to the political resolution presented at the fifth congress of the governing Communist Party (PCC), held in October that year.

The dissident statement called into question grassroots support for the PCC report – titled “The Party of Unity, Democracy and the Human Rights We Defend” – and demanded a multi-party system in place of Cuba’s single-party socialist regime.

According to the official statement issued Tuesday, Pedriz based her case on the argument that the activities of the accused violated, and incited violations of, state laws and provisions. The prosecutor alleged that the accused were working to forward the United States’ hostile policy toward Cuba.

The four dissidents are also charged with trying to dissuade foreign companies from investing in Cuba, and urging Cuban citizens not to vote in elections, in line with U.S. recommendations.

During the two-hour exposition of her case, Pedriz alleged that the accused had received financial and material support for their opposition activities from organisations located in the United States.

The official statement explained that the court had 12 working days to make its conclusions public. Once the verdict is issued, the defence will have 72 hours to appeal.

Spokespersons for opposition groups told IPS that several people arrested over the weekend, supposedly as a pre-trial preventive measure, had been released Tuesday.

Ten of around 100 people have been released so far, according to Rosa Maria Rodriguez, who said she belonged to a social democratic organisation, ‘Proyecto Democratico Cubano’ (Cuban Democratic Project).

The detainees included “several independent reporters whose fate we know nothing of yet,” she added.

The trial, to which the families of the accused had access, took place in a court located in the neighbourhood of Marianao, on the westside of Havana.

The head of the U.S. interests section, Michael Kozak, and official representatives of nine other countries who tried to gain access to the building were notified by authorities that the hearing was not open to the diplomatic corps or the foreign press.

In brief statements to accredited journalists, Kozak said he had gone to the site in solidarity with the accused, who he described as “good people.” He denied that dissidents in Cuba were a U.S. creation.

Kozac was one of the first diplomats to reach the environs of the court, where representatives from Germany, Canada, Spain, Great Britain, Poland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Switzerland and South Africa also gathered.

The trial is the first involving offences against interior state security since the passage of a new law designed to “protect the national independence and economy of Cuba.”

The new law, approved by parliament on Feb 16 along with other modifications of the legal code, criminalises actions that favour the 38-year-old U.S. blockade and other hostile acts against Cuba.

Pope John Paul II, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and other high-level figures who visited Cuba in 1998 unsuccesfully pressed for the release of the group headed by Roca, the son of one of the founders of the Communist Party in Cuba, the late Blas Roca.