Central Europe Online.
March 27, 2001.
PRAGUE, Mar 27, 2001 -- (CTK - Czech News Agency) Opposition Communist Party
of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) chairman Miroslav Grebenicek will visit Cuba and
meet Cuban President Fidel Castro next week, according to unofficial
information.
The KSCM's press department declined to comment on details of the visit,
which will take place at the invitation of Cuban Communists. Grebenicek's
itinerary is still being completed, the press department employees said.
Grebenicek himself told CTK that the KSCM Central Committee would discuss
contents of the visit at a meeting on March 31.
KSCM deputy chairwoman Zuzka Rujbrova told CTK that the KSCM Executive
Committee had already approved the names of the party delegates to leave for
Cuba. She said she was originally to accompany Grebenicek on his trip but would
not be able to do so due to her duties of a lower house deputy. The date of the
Cuban visit has been set for April 21-28, Rujbrova said. It will not be the
first visit by Czech Communists to Cuba since 1989.
Grebenicek, together with then KSCM deputy chairman Zdenek Klanica, visited
Cuba in 1998 already, without meeting Castro, however. If the Grebenicek-Castro
meeting did take place this time, it would be the first post-1989 meeting of top
Cuban and Czech Communist leaders. Castro visited former Communist
Czechoslovakia in the 1980s.
Recently the Czech Communists engaged in the case of right- wing opposition
deputy Ivan Pilip and entrepreneur and former student activist Jan Bubenik who
had been arrested in Cuba in January, after meeting two local opposition
representatives, and released almost one month later. Some politicians then
expressed indignation at Grebenicek's statement that Pilip and Bubenik had acted
at variance with Cuban law and that motives of their Cuban trip had not been
unclear.
((c) 2001 CTK - Czech News Agency)
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