By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 12 2000 (IPS)

Representatives of illegal opposition groups in Cuba are seeking support among participants at this week’s South Summit of the Group of 77 (G-77) coalition of 133 developing countries in the Cuban capital.

“We Cubans also have a right to our rights,” states a message sent by Oswaldo José Payá and José Rodríguez, members of the Christian Liberation Movement, to those attending the first summit meeting of the G-77, the largest coalition of countries of the developing South.

“The Summit is going to lift its voice from our country to demand the world to respect the rights of the South, without a single word of complaint about our oppressed people,” states the document presented by the dissident group to the foreign press accredited in Cuba.

The group added that it had decided to publicly demand respect for the rights of the Cuban people to ensure that the G-77 gathering “is not remembered as the Summit of Irony.”

“We welcome you, but want to clarify that you have chosen a setting where many men and women are in prison for defending the rights of all Cubans, especially of the poor, who are the majority,” says the communique.

The technical meetings of the G-77 summit began Monday, and heads of state and government and other high-level officials from 122 member countries will meet Wednesday through Friday.

The draft declaration to be approved by the presidents began to be discussed Monday, but a consensus looks difficult to reach. The one-day technical meeting was extended to Tuesday and could drag on even longer.

The document, drafted by Cuba, focuses mainly on social and economic rights and the need to build a new economic and human world order through a new North-South dialogue based on constructive foundations.

With respect to civil rights, the draft declaration states that the signatory countries will commit themselves to promoting “respect for all human rights and universally recognised fundamental liberties, including the right to development.”

The Christian Liberation Movement stated in its communique that like other dissident groups, it was fighting for respect for the “rights of freedom of expression, association and movement, as well as economic and social rights.

“Justifying the lack of civil and political rights in Cuba based on the comparison of development levels with poorer countries has become a virtual doctrine among Cuban leaders and their defenders.

“We reject any doctrine that expressly or in an underhand way supposes that universally recognised human rights can be put off or annulled when it comes to the people of the South. The inhabitants of the South are no less human,” the group argued.

Political opposition to Cuba’s socialist regime is prohibited by the constitution. But according to local authorities, opponents of the regime are a small minority spurred on and financed by the United States government.

The Fidel Castro administration holds Cuba up as an example of human rights due to the strides made in the past four decades in the areas of health, education, social security and access to jobs.

The 1999 Human Development Report by the United Nations Development Programme indicated that Cuba was indeed one of the developing countries with the lowest poverty levels.

But the Cuban government limits civil rights like freedom of association or expression, arguing that such spaces would be used as a channel for external aggression launched from the United States.

The Christian Liberation Movement argued that by denying civil rights, those who hold political and military power in Cuba have become a new “privileged class of nouveau riche” that coexists with a poor majority that “cannot even denounce it.”

Reporters Without Borders, meanwhile, asked United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to intervene on behalf of four journalists currently in prison, when he meets with Cuban authorities.

The four men under arrest for working as journalists without government authorisation are Bernardo Arévalo Padrón, Manuel Antonio González Castellanos, Jesús Joel Díaz Hernández and Víctor Rolando Arroyo Carmona.

The UN secretary-general reached Havana Monday night to take part in the summit and make an official visit to Cuba, including a meeting with President Castro, a visit to the University of Havana and a tour of Old Havana.

The ‘Mesa de Reflexión de la Oposición Moderada’, an umbrella of five illegal groups, recently expressed its wish to communicate “with as many personalities who will receive us” during the G-77 summit.

But diplomats ruled out the possibility of a repeat of last November’s ninth Ibero-American Summit in Havana, when opposition leaders won an unprecedented spot in the limelight.

At that time, representatives of several illegal groups met with Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar and presidents Julio María Sanguinetti of Uruguay and Jorge Sampaio of Portugal, as well as with several Latin American foreign ministers.

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