Group Says Jailed Cuban Dissidents Being Punished

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba has placed in solitary confinement most of the 75 people imprisoned in a recent crackdown on dissent that drew international condemnation, a human rights organization said on Tuesday.

"The immense majority, 60 in all, are in solitary confinement in the punishment wards of the country's maximum security prisons," said Elizardo Sanchez, president of the illegal, but tolerated, Cuban Human Rights Commission.

The dissidents were rounded up in late March, charged with working with the United States to overthrow the communist government and sentenced to an average of 19 years in prison after one-day trials closed to foreign diplomats and journalists.

Local human rights activists said the crackdown on Cuba's small, but growing, democracy movement was the worst in decades. The arrests brought protests from governments, human rights organizations and others world-wide.

The United States, Canada and the European Union are those threatening to take unspecific action against Havana if the dissidents are not released. Their sentences are under appeal.

Sanchez said the dissidents were being held in "inhuman conditions" in small cells where they received water and food "that does not meet minimum sanitary requirements." San chez, whose group has monitored Cuban prison conditions for years, said writer and poet Raul Rivero and leading dissidents Hector Palacios and Oscar Elias Biscet were among those in solitary confinement.

The wives of some of the dissidents confirmed Sanchez's statement, a few saying their husbands were being punished for not cooperating with prison authorities.

"He told me it was a very narrow cell. He has lost 30 pounds," Raul Rivero's wife, Blanca Reyes, said, after visiting her husband in central Ciego de Avila province.

Sanchez said many of the dissidents were sent to prisons far from their homes, making family visits difficult.

It was impossible to confirm the reports with Cuban authorities. They rarely comment on prison conditions and consider dissidents to be mercenaries and counterrevolutionaries working for the United States.

Washington and Havana have been bitter foes since President Fidel Castro swept to power in a 1959 revolution. The United States has maintained a trade embargo on the Caribbean island for more than four decades.

Let's Be Honest About Cuba*** Along with the same old pack of lies and willful misunderstandings that have always accompanied debate on Cuba, there has emerged a new set that, while shifting blame for Castro's misdeeds directly to the U.S., reveals a more disturbing trend in discussions about Cuba.

Before examining that, however, let's retire one particularly tired and self-contradictory "argument" against U.S. policy toward Cuba: The embargo is a convenient "excuse" for the Castro regime's failures.

At the minimal risk that a generalization like this creates, nobody who believes in (or at the very least understands) capitalism still holds that Cuba is an economic sinkhole because of U.S. foreign policy. As such, it is foolish to claim that the embargo is an "excuse" for the Castro regime's economic failure. This argument shifts blame to the Cuban people, for their implied stupidity. No émigré I've ever met believes their hardship resulted from U.S. policy. The embargo is an "excuse" only to the Left, for whose intellectual shortcomings I make no defense.

Everyone in Havana knows they receive one bar of soap per month because of decisions made by Castro, not Washington. To argue otherwise is to deny the Cuban people an "insight" most Americans take as common sense.

The most recent way to blame the United States for Castro's brutality is by criticizing the actions of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana. The argument goes that were it not for U.S. diplomats-invariably portrayed by the media and the Left (quibble, quibble) in C.I.A.-like terms-supporting pro-democracy forces in Cuba, Castro wouldn't have to hand out life sentences like candy.

This is an insidious form of blaming the victim, along the lines of a domestic abuse counselor inquiring, "Why didn't you stop complaining after your husband hit you the first time?"

If only those pesky Cubans didn't want freedom so badly and the U.S. government wasn't so willing to help them, Castro wouldn't have to play the stern father.

What appears to be an attack on American actions turns out to be a much harsher attack on those who support American values from abroad. Imagine blaming the Berlin Wall jumpers for forcing the guards to pick them off like tin ducks in a carnival.

Moral relativism is a valued tradition for the Left, but some on the Right also equate a principled policy decision with the type of restrictions on freedom implemented by Castro.***

Cubans taste freedom upon reaching shore - After dramatic journey, 3 migrants arrive in Key Largo***The Coast Guard threw the men life jackets. The men tossed back the jackets, but later accepted them. Hintzen said the fourth man gave himself up after growing too tired to keep swimming. While his companions bobbed in the water for more than hour -- two of them sharing one pair of swim fins and all three refusing assistance from Coast Guard officers -- the fourth migrant sat with his hands bound behind him. He was identified by Miami relatives as Jorge Parrado Martinez, who recently finished serving a 12-year prison sentence in Cuba after a failed attempt to flee. Parrado, who is in his 40s, was still aboard a Coast Guard vessel late Tuesday, said Ana Santiago, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ***

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