APRIL 6, 1999
By Andrew Cawthorne
HAVANA, April 5 (Reuters) - Cuba on Monday accused Western media of distorting the recent trial of four local dissidents as part of a "colossal anti-Cuban campaign" inspired by U.S. policy against the island.
An article in state-run newspaper Trabajadores outlined the government position that Western reporters gave the four an inflated importance and presented them as simple opponents of Fidel Castro's communist system without regard to their "counter-revolutionary" crimes.
The media ignored how the four matched Washington's policy, since the presidency of Jimmy Carter, of promoting internal opposition in a bid to destabilize Cuba, the article said.
"The media turned them into a permanent theme of information promotion, given them disproportionate relevance," wrote Trabajadores columnist and Cuban legislator Lazaro Barredo Medina, in the latest of his series of articles criticizing Western media coverage of Cuba.
"They always presented them as 'the most important dissident leaders in the country' when in reality none of them has any specific weight in the national life," he added.
The four, Vladimiro Roca, 56, a former Cuban fighter pilot and son of the island's deceased communist hero Blas Roca, academic Felix Bonne, 59, lawyer Rene Gomez Manzano, 55, and economist Marta Beatriz Roque, 53, were tried March 1.
Convicted of inciting sedition, they received jail terms of between 3-1/2 and five years.
Havana rejects the word dissident. It says the four were proved guilty of receiving material backing from Cuba's arch- enemy, the United States, urging a boycott of elections, intimidating foreign investors, making contacts with anti- Castro Cuban exile groups and encouraging Cubans abroad to make financial remittances conditional on change.
The four were detained in July 1997, soon after they issued documents and held news conferences criticizing the ruling Communist Party and urging reforms. They claim to represent peaceful opposition to Castro's one-party system.
Their jailing drew a wave of international criticism -- including from Cuba's biggest commercial partners Canada, Spain and Italy, but also from some major Asian and Latin American nations like Brazil and Japan.
That, say Cuban officials, was the Western media's fault for distorting the case.
Trabajadores said some left-leaning or progressive sectors in Latin America and Europe "are joining the colossal anti- Cuban campaign" by supporting the dissidents whose "mercenary actions have been camouflaged with the rhetoric that they are 'leftists and socialists misunderstood by the Cuban regime.'"
The newspaper said the four were directed by conservative elements of the U.S. right, were visited by foreign officials in Cuba trying to show "a supposed image of 'impartiality'", and were a source of information for foreign reporters.
The Trabajadores article followed other pieces in Cuba's state-run media denouncing the four as mercenaries and traitors, and attacking some Havana-based foreign correspondents for telling "lies" over the case.
The strong foreign response to the dissidents' case has threatened to undermine some of the diplomatic gains and foreign rapprochement Cuba achieved after the historic visit of Pope John Paul II in January 1998.
13:09 04-05-99
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited