Published:07/29/87
Section: FRONT

Page: 1A

CUBAN ACTIVIST: RIGHTS ABUSES CONTINUE
LEADER OF ILLEGAL GROUP SAYS REPRESSION HAS EASED SOMEWHAT

Ricardo Bofill, a one-time Marxist and leader of Cuba's only human rights group, said Tuesday that despite the release of hundreds of political prisoners and the apparent easing of police repression, serious abuses continue and the revolutionary government still refuses to legalize human rights work.

Bofill is president of the Cuban Human Rights Committee, a watchdog group that collects information on prison conditions and urges an end to political executions.

The group is illegal, and its activists have been repeatedly imprisoned, but Bofill and other committee members -- inspired by the improvement of Andrei Sakharov's condition in the Soviet Union -- said they hope Cuban authorities can be persuaded that human rights advocacy is not subversive.

"There are slight changes in the human rights picture," Bofill said. "The authorities are making less use of police repression to silence the views of dissidents. We're not sure this will last. We hope it'll continue."

Bofill made his comments during a sometimes tense interview in his upstairs apartment in Guanabacoa, an eastern suburb of Havana. His downstairs neighbor, a leader of a local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, apparently reported the arrival of two foreign journalists.

It was Bofill's first meeting with reporters since emerging
from five months of asylum in the French Embassy here in January, and the interview itself appeared to be a kind of test at a time of increasing interest in Cuba's human rights climate.

Expelled after interview

Last September, after an interview between Elizardo Sanchez, a former philosophy professor who is the committee's vice president, and two European journalists, Cuban authorities expelled both journalists and arrested Sanchez and two other committee leaders.

Bofill and Sanchez said this week they wanted to talk to reporters, on the record, to clarify their work and objectives, if the government would offer assurances that their statements would bring no reprisals.

Omar Mendoza, a spokesman for Cuba's Foreign Ministry, said Tuesday afternoon: "Bofill, like any other Cuban citizen, can talk to the press and express his criticism. He faces no restrictions.

"Bofill is the best example that in Cuba, human rights are respected," Mendoza said.

Mendoza said the government may have denied legal recognition to Bofill's committee because it is only "Bofill and three or four other persons and because Cuba's human rights record needs no monitoring.

"There's no government that has respected human rights like Cuba," he said.

Nonetheless, the island nation has faced increasing criticism from international human rights monitors and, perhaps as a result, since early 1985, has released thousands of political prisoners. Diplomats and church officials said in interviews the pace appears to be increasing.

In Miami, Bofill's wife, Maria Elena Bofill, said, "I am surprised that they permitted the interview."

But she said it was an example that human rights conditions had not improved enough for her husband to be allowed to leave Cuba.

"He is an example because they have not let him leave," she said. "He knows he is condemned to death there."

Jailed three times

The Foreign Ministry's Mendoza said Tuesday that there were "fewer than 800" political prisoners in Cuba. That figure does not include the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who are held for attempting to leave Cuba without permission.

Bofill, a onetime sociology professor and writer who has been jailed three times for a total of 10 years since 1967, was one of Amnesty International's Prisoners of Conscience in 1985. His sojourn in the French Embassy last year increased his fame.

Offering his first account of the incident, Bofill said that without intending to seek asylum, he went to speak with diplomats at the French Embassy on Aug. 28, 1986, about the arrest of two committee activists days earlier. Police surrounded the embassy while he was inside, he said, and a French diplomat who sought an explanation in the Cuban Foreign Ministry was told that Bofill would be arrested when he came out.

Disputes Castro version

As a result, according to Bofill, the French government invited him to stay on "as a guest," opening five months of negotiations that ended with Bofill's departure from the embassy in January. Bofill said that during the negotiations, the French government defended the right of Cuban citizens to visit the French Embassy, just as French citizens are free to visit with Cuban diplomats in Paris.

Cuban President Fidel Castro, in a May 25 interview with the French Communist newspaper L'Humanite, said Bofill had entered the French Embassy "by force." Bofill denied that his
entrance to the embassy had been anything but normal.

French diplomats were unavailable for comment.

Contradicting published reports, Bofill and Sanchez denied that they were seeking to emigrate from Cuba. Instead, they said, they are pressuring for the right to travel freely in and out of Cuba.

"We don't urge Cubans to emigrate. The massive emigration of Cubans solves nothing," Sanchez said.

Bofill, 46, and Sanchez, 44, like several other committee activists, were both professors at the University of Havana until their expulsion and imprisonment after 1967. After long jail terms and discussions with several Eastern European human rights activists, the two formed the committee in 1976.

Collecting testimony

Bofill said the greatest accomplishment of the committee since its founding has been to survive the 11 years of clandestine and semi-clandestine work.

Today it is an organization of 10 directors, numerous activists and hundreds of sympathizers, Bofill said. Working out of homes and collecting testimonies -- many scribbled on cigarette wrappers and smuggled out of prisons -- the committee assembles information on Cuban political prisoners and human rights abuses.

During an interview, Sanchez asked a colleague to bring a letter Sanchez wrote from prison last year to Castro, protesting alleged psychological pressures exerted on prisoners. The colleague returned, having retrieved the "file" from a neighbor's house: It was a plastic bag, carefully folded for concealment, filled with tiny meticulously written documents. All but one of the committee leaders are unemployed, living on donations from relatives. Sanchez frequently rides his bicycle to interview relatives of political prisoners. When the committee learns of a new case in eastern Cuba, committee activists in Santiago are dispatched to investigate.

Bofill said the committee's main objective continues to be to pressure for an end to secret firing squad executions. He cites names and dates from memory, of prisoners shot after secret trials: A worker at a Santiago rum distillery; three brothers arrested after a violent incident at the Vatican Embassy; two peasants whose relatives he met in prison.

Bofill pointed to several cases in recent years in which prisoners condemned to death have had their sentences commuted to life after international pressure resulting from the Cuban committee's research.

"We're not an opposition group, and we don't conspire against the state. We say we can help the government carry out a better public administration," said Sanchez.

"We're ready to give our lives," said Bofill. "We don't want to defy the authorities. . . . In time they'll understand our efforts are necessary and historically justifiable."

Sanchez was asked about reports of an apertura in Cuba. "I think that's exaggerated," he said. "Our position remains as dangerous as ever."