Central Europe Online,
March 20, 2001.
MIAMI, Mar 20, 2001 -- (CTK - Czech News Agency) Czech deputy Ivan Pilip and
Czech former student activist Jan Bubenik, who, after having met two Cuban
dissidents, were both arrested on January 12 and then jailed for nearly a month
and accused of being "foreign agents", have said they believe that
Cuban hard-liners wanted a show trial of them. According to The Associated
Press, Pilip and Bubenik, who are currently on a visit to the United States,
where in Miami, Florida, they are having meetings with Cuban-Americans about
what happened in Cuba, told around a dozen journalists during a discussion at
the newspaper The Miami Herald that while they were in jail in Cuba, they had
never been harmed physically by Cuban secret police, but had been
psychologically abused.
The two were released after a few weeks following diplomatic negotiations,
including face-to-face talks in Havana between Castro and Czech Senate chairman
Petr Pithart, whose letter to Castro expressing concern about the two Czechs
Castro had answered by inviting him to come to Cuba to discuss the situation.
Bubenik, a former student activist during the 1989 "Velvet Revolution"
which led to the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, said, for example that in
jail in Cuba he had been shown a photograph of his family that he had never seen
before, which gave him the impression that Cuban officials knew more about him
than he had suspected.
Only later did he realize that the photo had been on the roll of film in the
camera that had been taken from him when he was arrested. Pilip, 37, and
Bubenik, 32, said that when they were arrested it did not concern them very
much, since Cuba usually only deports foreign visitors who meet dissidents.
They added, however, that they think Cuban leader Fidel Castro became
furious and angry when the news about their arrest quickly spread all over the
world. Castro "got so infuriated; he is so paranoid and felt that this was
some kind of a plot against him," Bubenik said. Pilip and Bubenik both told
the AP they expected that Castro's government would eventually collapse, but
they said they believed this would not happen until either Castro dies or is
incapacitated.
The two also made a comparison between Cuba now and the situation of
Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, when "most people were fed up with communism,
but only a few were willing to speak out," until "this formerly silent
majority arose and helped hasten communism's demise," the AP says.
((c) 2001 CTK - Czech News Agency)
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