Spain considers itself finished with the question of Cuban political prisoners — a disappointment to many leading Cuban dissidents because there remain in the Castro gulag dozens of more political prisoners who won't benefit from the July 2010 release deal between Madrid, the Cuban Catholic Church and the Castro dictatorship.
EFE reports, via Fox Latino News:
Havana – Members of the Cuban opposition expressed regret Friday at Spain's announcement that the process of releasing prisoners in Cuba that began last year has come to an end, because they believe there are still some 50 political prisoners behind bars on the island.
The spokesman for the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, Elizardo Sanchez, said that the end of the process begun July 2010 by the Cuban government with the mediation of the Catholic Church and the support of Spain "is very bad news."
"There are at least 50 well-documented cases of people in prison for political reasons, many of them the most hated by the Castro regime, so naturally they're the most vulnerable," Sanchez told Efe.
Among those cases are former officials or military officers considered to be "traitors, spies and saboteurs," as well as "very radical" political dissidents and members of anti-Castro organizations in exile that landed in Cuba with weapons to oppose the regime, the dissident said.
Sanchez was also sorry that neither Spain nor the Catholic Church "had been capable of making a proposal" during the process, letting the Cuban government be the one to choose - and it made its selection "entirely in its own interest."
"We have to keep turning to the international community to try and protect these 50 or more political prisoners," he said.
A communique released Friday by the Spanish Foreign Ministry said that the release of prisoners worked out by the government and the Catholic Church ended with the arrival in Madrid this week of 37 freed dissidents together with 200 family members.
Over the last nine months, 115 prisoners were freed, of whom 103 went to Spain with 647 family members, and only 12, from the "Group of 75" jailed in March 2003, remain in Cuba, having refused exile to Spain.
The total includes all of the jailed Cuban dissidents designated by Amnesty International as prisoners of conscience.
Oscar Biscet, one of the Group of 75 prisoners who refused exile, called this wrapping up of the liberation process a "setback for the cause of democracy" in Cuba.
For her part, Laura Pollan, spokeswoman for the Ladies in White, comprising relatives of the Group of 75 who ask for the freeing of all political prisoners, thanked the government and particularly the Spanish people for having received 1,000 prisoners and their families amid serious economic difficulties in the Iberian nation.
"I believe we must be thankful for what Spain has done. Many years ago there were never less than 100 on the lists of political prisoners in Cuba," Pollan said.
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