Como se combate o populismo? "Com eleições", responde Fukuyama

[mcarvalho]

UPDATE 1-Cuba ejects two Polish members of European Parliament

18/05/2005 22:25

(Adds European legislators already in Cuba)

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA, May 18 (Reuters) - Two Polish members of the European Parliament who planned to attend a dissident meeting in Cuba were denied entry by the island's Communist authorities and sent back to Europe, a Polish diplomat said on Wednesday.

Boguslaw Sonik and Jacek Protasiewicz arrived in Cuba on Tuesday afternoon and were denied entry by immigration officials at the airport of Varadero, Cuba's top beach resort.

"The legislators were traveling on private passports and had tourist visas," the Polish consul in Havana, Piotr Turzanski, said. "They were not arrested but were told to re-board" the plane they arrived on, he said.

Sonik and Protasiewicz were among dozens of foreign politicians invited as observers to a meeting that opponents of President Fidel Castro plan to hold in Havana on Friday to push for a transition to democracy in Cuba.

"Despite the fact that we showed our diplomatic passports, they ejected us out of Cuba where we went to as tourists to take part in a meeting of Havana citizens," Sonik told Reuters in Warsaw.

It is uncertain whether the Cuban government will allow the first meeting of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba, an umbrella organization of dozens of small dissident groups led by dissident economist Martha Beatriz Roque.

Legislators already in Cuba to attend Friday's meeting include Czech senator Karel Schwarzenberg, who was former President Vaclav Havel's chief of staff, and Arnold Vaatz, deputy head of the CDU/CSU group in the European Parliament.

European diplomats are watching closely to see if Cuba will allow the meeting to take place freely. The European Union must decide next month whether to reapply diplomatic sanctions over human rights abuses in Cuba, which has ignored EU calls for the release of 61 jailed dissidents.

Sonik said he and Protasiewicz want their European People's Party parliamentary group to take a stance on Cuba before the EU discussion on policy toward Havana due by the end of June.

"We are against loosening diplomatic sanctions against Cuba and we demand the freeing of political prisoners," he said.

Cuba barred entry to a Spanish parliamentarian and two Dutch legislators on a trip to support dissidents in October.

A former Czech finance minister and a former Czech student leader were arrested in 2001 for meeting with dissidents. They were released three weeks later after admitting they had unwittingly broken Cuban laws.

(Additional reporting by Pawel Sobczak in Warsaw) ((Reporting by Anthony Boadle; anthony.boadle@reuters.com; Havana newsroom, +537 833-3145))