Dissidents sentenced

last updated 8 January 2015

Havana

Cuban courts this week began handing out lengthy jail sentences to dissidents arrested in the Castro regime’s biggest political crackdown in decades. Opposition political party leader Hector Palacios was sentenced to 25 years, and Cuba’s best-known dissident, poet and journalist Raul Rivero, was sentenced to 20 years. “This is so arbitrary for a man whose only crime is to write what he thinks,” said Blanca Reyes, Rivero’s wife. The government recently arrested 78 dissidents, charging them with opposing President Fidel Castro and “working with a foreign power to undermine the government.” The crackdown came in response to efforts by the Bush administration to encourage Cuban dissent; many of those arrested had been meeting regularly at the home of the top U.S. diplomat in Havana, James Cason. Castro recently denounced Cason as “an incubator of counter-revolution.”