Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Castro's security agents hold 65 dissidents

Anita Snow
Saturday 22 March 2003 01:00 GMT
Comments

Fidel Castro's security agents have arrested some of the government's better-known critics in a crackdown that has pulled in at least 65 dissidents accused of working with US diplomats to undermine Cuba's socialist system.

With the world focused on the war on Iraq, authorities in Cuba began looking at its high-profile opponents yesterday evening, picking up Raul Rivero, the island's best-known independent journalist.

"He is only a man who writes, he is not a politician," Mr Rivero's wife, Blanca Reyes, said. Mr Rivero's mother, Hortensia Castaneda, 83, wept quietly at her side.

"He knew they would come for him in this wave of repression," said Ms Reyes. "But until then he was informing the entire world what was happening here."

State security agents also detained Hector Palacios, a leading organiser of the Varela Project reform effort, after an extensive search of his home, said the veteran human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez.

Mr Sanchez and the Varela Project's chief organiser, Oswaldo Paya, reported that their homes were under heavy surveillance by plainclothes security officers yesterday.

Earlier in the day, agents arrested several people at a home where people were fasting to demand the release of a political prisoner. The day's arrests raised the number of detentions during three days to at least 65, according to Mr Sanchez, of the non-government Cuban Commission on Human Rights and Reconciliation. At least a dozen are independent journalists.

The group was investigating reports of at least ten other arrests. Mr Sanchez said: "We don't know how far this crackdown is going to go. The Cuban government wants to silence the dissident movement. But that is not possible."

The Bush administration denounced the arrests as "an appalling act of intimidation".

¿ Some of the passengers and crew aboard the Cuban airliner that was hijacked and flown to Florida might seek asylum in the Untied States, a federal prosecutor said yesterday.

The six men who diverted the plane at knifepoint, apparently to try to gain asylum, were charged yesterday but a lawyer, Marcos Jimenez, said some of the 24 passengers and six hijacked crew members might ask to stay.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in