Cuba ready to resolve political prisoners issue: Church
By Isabel Sanchez (AFP)
HAVANA — President Raul Castro is ready to consider resolving the thorny issue of Cuba’s jailing of political dissidents, though talk about releasing them was off the table for now, a Catholic Church official said.
“This issue was talked about and I believe both sides are ready and want to resolve it and we hope this will be done. I believe this will be done,” Cuba’s Episcopal Conference leader Archbishop Dionisio Garcia said after an unprecedented discussion with Castro on Wednesday.
Asked whether the talks might lead to an agreement to free the political prisoners, Garcia responded cautiously.
“There will be a process and this process has to start with small steps and these steps will be made,” he told AFP. “We hope that the conversation will go in that direction.” Garcia was accompanied at the meeting in Castro’s office by Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega, who also said the “positive meeting” with the president raised hopes of a breakthrough.
Ortega said that while “we hope” political dissidents will be released, “regarding the sick ones, we expect it,” for humanitarian reasons.
Dissident groups say there are more than 200 political prisoners held in Cuban jails. Amnesty International considers 65 of them as prisoners of conscience.
Cuba denies it holds any political prisoners and calls dissidents “mercenaries” funded by the United States and a conservative Cuban-American “mafia.” Several of the detainees have gone on a hunger strike and are in poor health. Orlando Zapata died in jail in February after not eating for 85 days.
The Catholic Church has pressed Castro’s Communist regime on the issue, without, however, resorting to confrontation. It has persuaded authorities to drop a ban on a group of wives and female relatives of jailed dissidents known as the Damas de Blanco (the Ladies in White) holding a public march calling for their loved ones to be released.
Garcia described the talks with Castro as “very cordial” and ranging across several topics “of common interest.”
Ortega said the Ladies in White were also discussed at the meeting.
The Cuban government’s mouthpiece newspaper Granma noted the meeting but did not mention the political prisoners issue.
It said Castro and the two Church officials spoke on “various subjects” including “the favorable development of relations between the Catholic Church and the Cuban state.”
The meeting came ahead of a June 16-20 visit by the Vatican’s official in charge of foreign relations, Monsignor Dominique Mamberti, who is scheduled to meet Cuban leaders on the occasion of 75 years of ties between the Communist island and the Holy See, and to head a Catholic “social week.”
In 1998, when the late pope John Paul II made the only visit to Cuba by a pontiff, then-president Fidel Castro released more than 300 political and ordinary prisoners.
