The press conference took place at the house of Martha Beatriz Roque in Havana on January 3. The event was participated by independent lawyer Rene Gomez Manzano and Professor Felix Bonne Carcasses. All the three are former political prisoners and co-authors of the famous manifesto “The Homeland Belongs to Us”.
Martha Beatriz Roque said the crackdown on opposition activists had increased in 2002. She read a partial list of 39 dissidents who were arbitrarily taken to prison last year. Some have been in jail for almost a year now and, in breach of Cuban law, have not been told the date of their trial, she stressed.
In Roque’s words, the Cuban government does not want the dissidents on the street, and that is very serious. “Look inside the country,” she urged the international community. “See what happens to those who oppose the system.”
Lawyer Rene Gomez Manzano explained that dissidents either undergo a summary trial that does not give time to notify their family, or, more usual, their trial is extended excessively.
He referred in particular to another lawyer, blind Juan Carlos Gonzalez Leiva, a member of the Independent Lawyers Organization, who was arrested on March 4, 2002, for an action of protest against police abuse in the town of Ciego de Avila, and has been awaiting trial since then. “He is the only blind political prisoner I know about in the world,” said Rene Gomez Manzano.
According to Gomez Manzano, another characteristic of the trials in Cuba is that the accused, with rare exceptions, are always sentenced to whatever penalty is requested by the prosecution. The dissidents informed that during year 2003 the priority of the Assembly to Promote the Civil Society will be solidarity with the political prisoners.
The other issue they touched upon was the forthcoming elections of the People’s Power to be held on January 19. Martha Beatriz Roque reminded Cubans that they have the right “not to attend the vote, to annul the ballot or to leave it blank”, and asked dissidents to attend the vote count to detect irregularities, “something to which the electoral law gives us the right.” She warned, however, that this did not mean giving legitimacy to the government elections in which “all the candidates are nominated by the government” and the number of candidates coincides with the number of positions in dispute.
Gomez Manzano said that there was nothing to “elect” because no alternatives were given, and that this was only a reaffirmation of the totalitarian rule of the Communist Party.