MIAMI, Florida
(June 28, 2000)-In commemorating the third anniversary of the publication
in 1997 of a document criticizing the Cuban government, titled "La
Patria es de Todos (The Country Belongs to All), one of its authors,
Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, released last month after spending
almost three years in prison, comments on the Inter American Press
Associations Web site on the standards of living in her country
now.
She makes the comments in a column, "Just an Opinion,"
posted on the site (http://cuba.sipiapa.org). In it, she tells of
the way of life of the Cubans and the "hopelessness" they
face. "The deterioration in the standard of living of certain
social strata is certainly alarming," she writes.
Roque gives her views on the opposition within Cuba, the political
scene, the difficulty of obtaining essential goods and the social,
family and moral upheaval. She concludes that it is up to the Cubans
themselves to "forge our own destiny."
The writer, together with human rights activists Vladimiro Roca,
Félix Bonne and René Gómez Manzano, on June
27, 1997, issued "La Patria es de Todos" in opposition
to the Communist-led government in Havana.
After being held in custody for 20 months, the four were put on
trial in July last year and all were given prison sentences. Three
has since been released, but Roca remains incarcerated.
Also posted on the IAPA Web site is a report of a hunger strike
being waged by a group of political prisoners at the Holguín
provincial prison in eastern Cuba in support of independent journalist
Manual Antonio González Castellanos, whose books and notes
were confiscated by prison authorities on June 25.
González Castellanos, serving a two year seven months prison
term for showing contempt toward Cuban President Fidel Castro, is
now being held in solitary confinement. The hunger strikers are
demanding he be returned to his own cell block.
The IAPA Web site on Cuba, which can also be visited via the hemisphere
free-press organizations home page, www.sipiapa.org, features detailed
reports from independent journalists working for the Cuba Press
news agency, opinion pieces and other material from Havana.