By IANS/EFE,
Havana : The state of human rights in Cuba did not improve last year and is unlikely to get better in 2010, a dissident organisation said, though noting that the number of political prisoners declined from 205 to 201.
“Unless a miracle happens, the situation of civil, political and economic rights in Cuba will remain the same or worse in the course of 2010,” the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation said Tuesday in a statement distributed to the press by its chairman, Elizardo Sanchez.
“Nothing indicates that the current governors are ready to initiate the judicial, economic and political reforms the country needs,” the document said.
Some in Cuba and abroad had hoped that the transfer of power from the ailing Fidel Castro to his younger brother would bring an easing of the Communist Party’s grip. But while Raul Castro has encouraged more open debate within official forums, he has shown no inclination to relinquish the government’s media monopoly.
In its report on 2009, the human rights commission attributes continuing repression to fear on the part of a “minority within the top nomenclatura (leadership) that continues exercising totalitarian power”.
That minority, according to the commission, is afraid that loosening the reins would be tantamount to opening a “Pandora’s box” of the communist regime’s past crimes.
The report cited an increase in authorities’s tendency to “replace political repression based on prolonged incarceration with other procedures, equally illegal but less costly from the political viewpoint, such as brief arbitrary detentions, threats and other forms of intimidation”.
One of those tactics involves the deployment of government supporters to verbally harass and – sometimes – physically accost dissidents as they try to mount peaceful protests.
A total of 869 government opponents were detained in 2009, some of them more than once, the commission said, frequently on the charge of “pre-criminal social dangerous”, an offence unique to the Cuban penal code.
Last year’s reduction in the total number of political prisoners was due largely to detainees completing their sentences, the commission said.
“Particularly disturbing” are the cases of Santiago Padron, Ihosvani Suris and Maximo Pradera, “radical anti-Castro opponents” who have been held without trial since 2001, the report said.
The commission also noted that while it is almost two years since the Cuban government signed two major UN human rights conventions, Havana has taken no steps to ratify or implement the accords.