Busting Heads In Havana
Cuban authorities carried out a large-scale raid on an anti-government demonstration in Santiago de Cuba, storming a church, gassing, beating and finally arresting 15 dissidents. Catholic clergy report that the Cuban police desecrated the church, kicking open the doors and conducting the violent display of brute force.
The priest of Santa Teresita church in Santiago de Cuba, Jose Conrado Rodriguez, said at least five people were detained during the crackdown on Tuesday, in the Americas' only one-party communist-ruled state.
A leading dissident group said 15 people were rounded up by police in what it said was an "extremely serious act of political repression".
"They barged in spraying gas in the faces of people from those spray cans, and went about dishing out blows and shouting," Conrado Rodriguez told AFP by telephone.
He said about 15-20 patrol cars turned up at the church, outside which some 600 people had gathered, many of them from a protest march that had just ended.
Some 25 dissidents dressed in black had walked inside the church to protest the arrest of another government opponent, said Elizardo Sanchez, president of the Cuban Human Rights and National Reconciliation Commission.
"The repressors, headed by a lieutenant colonel and other state security officers, desecrated the church of Santa Teresita after kicking one of its doors open and savagely assaulting the peaceful dissidents," he said in a statement.
Seven of those arrested remain in custody. Cuba likes to say that they have no political prisoners. They do that by stating all the people rotting in their jails for political activities are foreign mercenaries. For the edification of those who perform interpretive dances here in the US in praise of Fidel Castro, this is what actual repression looks like. Perhaps your next terpsichorean soirée could strive for a more realistic approach and add gas and club-wielding thugs.
World news | Gaius Thursday, 6 December , 2007
By feeblemind, Thursday, 6 December , 2007 @ 12:19 pm
Gaius, in case you are interested, there is an article at the UK Times titled ‘Tell the Truth’ Seminars for TV and radio personnel to cost 1 Million pounds. You can’t make this stuff up. The Beeb is going to hold 2 hr seminars for 17000 people to remind them of the importance of telling viewers/listeners the truth. “http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article3001104.ece”
By Maggie, Thursday, 6 December , 2007 @ 6:59 pm
Cuba not a friend of her people?
Che it ain’t so …