Cuban security ever vigilant

Herald Staff Report

HAVANA -- Cuban security agents carried off at least three people who shouted anti-Castro slogans or criticized the government before foreign TV cameras during Pope John Paul II's final Mass in Havana, journalists say.

Reporters who were at the Mass Sunday said security appeared to be tighter than in the papal masses in Santa Clara, Camaguey and Santiago de Cuba.

Many agents wore red bandannas around their necks and white T-shirts with a photo of the pope and President Fidel Castro, while those who led chants to drown out political protesters wore black T-shirts, witnesses said.

Repeated chants of ``Freedom!'' nevertheless washed over the hundreds of thousands in the Plaza de la Revolucion, the first significant outbreak of discontent with the government since a 1994 riot in central Havana.

Foreign TV cameras filmed security agents as they escorted one young woman who held up a white placard that said, ``Down with the Castro Brothers' Dictatorship,'' out of the plaza, then took away her sign and crumpled it. Witnesses said security agents later took the woman and a male companion to a waiting car and drove them away. She has not been identified.

Later in the Mass, witnesses said, several security agents approached a young man who was shouting anti-government slogans and whispered, ``Hey, didn't you hear Fidel say that we should be silent and listen to the pope?''

The man replied he was doing nothing wrong, but one of the agents got on a hand-held radio. A Cuban Red Cross ambulance soon arrived and four burly men wearing Red Cross vests took the young man away, the witnesses said.

Unlike most Red Cross chapters around the world, which are independent, the Cuban Red Cross is controlled by the government.

Still later, witnesses said security agents approached a man in his 40s who had been making critical statements about the Castro government to an ABC network camera crew. The agents, who had been watching as the man spoke to the cameras, escorted him away when the crew left, witnesses said.

But other outbursts of anti-Castro criticism at the pope's historic Mass apparently went unnoticed by the security agents.

As the pope thanked Castro, who sat in the audience, for his help in arranging his visit, someone shouted out ``Eliminate him!'' according to one U.S. newspaper report. And a CBS-Telenoticias camera crew showed a woman at the Mass hysterically shouting ``Down with Fidel! Don't be afraid! . . . Enough already!'' until a male friend made her stop shouting and led her away.