By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Jul 17 2000 (IPS)

The Cuban government uses “low-intensity repression” against opponents of its socialist regime, an illegal human rights organisation stated in a communique distributed to foreign correspondents Monday.

The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN) said the government’s new policy toward dissidents consisted of “repeated arrests that last several hours, days or weeks, or visits and warnings by the secret police.

“It is evident that the Cuban government has been replacing its past policy of long prison sentences” for dissidents “with a kind of low-intensity repression,” said the report signed by Elizardo Sánchez, the head of the CCDHRN.

The document provides an updated list of activists sanctioned or prosecuted for political reasons, including 19 new cases since January.

There is no official information available on Cuba’s prison population.

Political opposition to the government of Fidel Castro is illegal in Cuba, and dissident groups are considered to be in cahoots with Cuban exile groups in the United States and with the interests of that country, which has maintained an economic and trade embargo against this Caribbean island nation since 1961.

The latest issue of the list drawn up half-yearly by the CCDHRN documents 314 cases in which sanctions have been taken against dissidents or of activists awaiting trial, and 47 cases on which no recent information is available and in which there are “reasonable misgivings regarding their current status.

“Our commission estimates that around 15 percent of the people mentioned are prisoners of conscience or possible prisoners of conscience,” states an explanatory note at the bottom of the list of names.

The CCDHRN said it had confirmed the names of around 50 “peaceful opponents” of the regime targetted by the “low- intensity repression” this month, “of which at least three (Carlos López Santos, Carlos Alberto Domínguez and René Montes de Oca) remained under arrest” as of Sunday.

Nevertheless, the report pointed to “a positive tendency seen in the past 10 years, with the number of people in detention for political reasons reduced from more than 1,000 to a few hundred.”

After a rise in the number of detentions late last year, the total number of political prisoners has dropped by at least 30 since last December, according to the CCDHRN.

A report released by the rights group on Mar 2 stated that “the greatest number of actions of political repression” in the past 10 years took place from November to February.

The commission reported 121 arrests and 96 “restrictions of movement” in November, and 141 arrests and a similar number of restrictions of movement in December.

The document adds that 96 percent of the 352 people detained in the past quarter were released without charges “in a matter of hours or a few days,” considered “the best proof of innocence of the hundreds of citizens involved.”

The increase in the number of arrests coincided with the start of the ideological offensive unleashed in December by the Castro government demanding the return of Cuban shipwreck boy Elián González from the United States, which finally occurred Jun 28.

On Apr 18, the United Nations Human Rights Commission approved a resolution condemning Cuba for “continued violations of human rights and individual freedoms,” despite the expectations it said were awakened by a number of “positive measures adopted by the government in the past few years.”

And a report released Jun 14 by the London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International pointed to the absence of political freedom in Cuba, the heavy harassment of dissidents, and trials lacking international guarantees of due process.

The report, which dedicated a special chapter to human rights in Cuba, documented at least 13 executions, while another nine prisoners remained on death row.

Last week, the Cuban Church in Cuba added its voice to the international pressure, asking authorities to be allowed access to prisons in order to deliver “a message of faith” to the men and women living behind bars.

“Today I would have liked to hold mass in one of the prisons,” said Cardinal Jaime Ortega after giving his blessing to all of those serving time for committing crimes or for their way of thinking. “I still have the hope that I will be able to do so before the end of the year of the Jubilee.”

Sánchez, one of Cuba’s best-known dissidents, described Cuba as “the only closed society in the entire Western hemisphere,” and a country where “all civil and political rights of citizens are violated.”

The Castro government “blocks any possibility of national or international scrutiny in the humanitarian sphere by NGOs like the International Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International or local groups,” says the CCDHRN report.

Local authorities, however, hold Cuba up as an example of respect for human rights, starting with the right to life. They also argue that no country in the world guarantees full respect for such rights.

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