HUMAN RIGHTS-CUBA: Foreign Lawmakers Voice Criticism in Havana

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Apr 4 2001 (IPS) - Cuba’s human rights record was criticised in Havana by foreign lawmakers attending the 105th Conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), which runs through Saturday.

Moreover, while 1,400 legislators from 120 countries take part in the Conference, which opened last Sunday, parliamentarians from Europe and Latin America have met with representatives of illegal internal opposition groups.

Several foreign lawmakers used the podium to demand that the socialist government of President Fidel Castro allow a democratic opening to a multi-party system and the full exercise of individual rights, even though the question did not figure on the official agenda of the conference.

While Cuban delegates attributed most of the criticism to a smear campaign, they said some of the speeches merely reflected ignorance of the reality of this Caribbean island nation.

“We do not accept pressure from anyone, and we will consequently apply our laws to defend ourselves from whoever violates them,” the vice-president of the Cuban parliament, Jaime Crombet, warned at one of the sessions.

Crombet criticised a U.S. bill, the Cuban Internal Opposition Assistance Act of 2000, which he said was aimed at “fomenting counter-revolutionary subversion” against the Castro government.

The United States is not attending the current IPU meeting.

“Cuba must be very attentive to the rights of its people and to respect for the principles of individual liberty,” said French parliamentarian Pierre Pauchon.

Germany’s Dieter Schloten, meanwhile, said Cuba fell short in terms of respect for civil and political rights, while a representative of Esthonia mentioned the case of two Czech nationals who were arrested and deported early this year.

Ivan Pilip, a parliamentarian and former finance minister of the Czech Republic, and Czech national Jan Bubenik were detained on Jan 12 on charges of violating Cuban law, Crombet responded.

The Cuban lawmaker maintained that Pilip and Bubenik were sent to Cuba by the extreme right-wing U.S. organisation Freedom House, with the mission of “instructing, supplying and financing isolated elements that aspire, with great impotence and to the disdain of our people, to Cuba’s annexation by the United States.”

The case was discussed by the IPU Human Rights Committee, whose chairman, Chilean lawmaker Juan Pablo Letelier, described the resolution of the incident as “tremendously satisfactory.”

“They were released and ordered to leave the country, after they issued a statement in which they admitted to violating Cuban law,” said Letelier.

By Wednesday, lawmakers from Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Panama, Spain, Sweden, and Uruguay had met with members of the internal opposition.

“There is a marked interest in getting a closer view of the reality of the human rights situation” in Cuba, Manuel Cuesta Morúa, with the dissident Democratic Socialist Current, told IPS.

The Current is part of the Reflection Panel of the Moderate Opposition, an illegal group also comprised of the Democratic Solidarity Party, the Cuban Democratic Project and the Movement for National Reconciliation.

“We have discussed initiatives by these groups on democracy and against the death penalty,” said the vice-president of the European Parliament, Renzo Imberti, who was accompanied by European deputies Marianne Erickson and Jean Kss Wiebrgag in his meetings with members of illegal opposition groups.

Imberti said the European Union would once again attempt to take a common stance against Cuba when the United Nations Human Rights Commission votes this month in Geneva on a censure motion sponsored by the Czech Republic.

But “I do not believe that an initiative in Geneva against Cuba can be useful for democracy” here “at this time,” Imberti told the reporters who flocked around him after his meeting with the dissidents.

Elizardo Sánchez, the president of another dissident group, the Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said he had shared, with the European parliamentarians, “the good news” that the death penalty had not been applied in Cuba since April 2000.

Two Salvadorans convicted of taking part in a wave of bombings of tourist installations in Havana have been on death row in Cuba since 1998.

Reforms of the penal code approved in the late 1990s extended capital punishment to cases of drug trafficking with aggravating circumstances.

“We are seeing a moratorium on the death penalty, but we should move on to its abolition,” said Sánchez.

The agenda of the IPU Conference includes debates on international law, and on education and culture as instruments of development. On the request of the Cuban delegation, participants are also discussing the contribution that legislators around the world can make to the fight against terrorism.

That initiative could bolster Havana’s request for Panama to extradite Cuban-American citizen Luis Posada Carriles, accused of bombing a Cuban airplane in 1976 and of planning an aborted attempt on Castro’s life last year.

Posada Carriles has been under arrest in Panama since November on charges of planning an attack on Castro at last year’s Ibero- American Summit in Panama City.