ABC. Feb. 9, 2000
HAVANA, Feb 9 - Cuba's state prosecution is seeking a 10-year jail sentence for a militant anti-Castro dissident, in prison since November after a string of anti- government protests, his wife said on Wednesday.
Elsa Morejon said she would explain at a news conference Thursday the various charges against her husband, Oscar Elias Biscet, in a prosecution document delivered to his lawyer.
"They are accusing him of different things, but it adds up to 10 years' jail," she said in a brief telephone interview.
No trial date has yet been set for Biscet, a medical doctor turned activist who is being held in Havana's Cien y Aldabo detention centre. International rights' group Amnesty International has put him on its prisoner of conscience list, and local dissidents have been rallying to his cause.
Biscet was arrested early in November after trying to organise a protest march against President Fidel Castro's government ahead of a summit of Ibero-American heads of state in Cuba. That summit included unprecedented meetings on Cuban soil between visiting dignitaries and local dissidents,
and a series of calls for multi-party democracy in Cuba.
In a speech prior to Biscet's arrest, Castro himself denounced him by name as a "counter-revolutionary" trouble- maker and accused him of acting on the orders of the U.S. government, which is opposed to communist rule in Cuba.
"There is a rather provocative gentleman and, in my opinion, a bit disturbed, frankly, for the things he does, for the problems he causes, for the disputes he has with his own people," Castro said at the time.
Biscet, in and out of detention all last year, had said he represents peaceful opposition to Castro's one-party socialist system, and speaks for human rights and political prisoners. He leads a local rights' group called the Lawton Foundation.
Some of his activities -- including a fast and open-air meetings to promote civil disobedience -- were unusually provocative in Cuba's tightly controlled society. He has not hidden links to anti-Castro, Cuban-American groups in Florida.
Havana does not accept the word "dissident," saying all opponents are "mercenaries" and "traitors" who are punished like ordinary criminals if they infringe the penal code.
Cuba's small and illegal opposition groups have no access to state media and are generally better-known by foreign correspondents and diplomats than the island's people at large.
Biscet's supporters had announced last week that he would be tried and charged with "public disorder" for a 1999, anti- abortion protest and faced two to three years in jail for that. But his wife said further charges had been added.
Cuba's authorities are sensitive to foreign accusations that they repress political opposition and so sometimes seek to prosecute dissidents for common, rather than political, crimes.
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