The reported executions appear to be part of a two-month government crackdown on rising crime and delinquency that President Fidel Castro had said threatened the underpinnings of the socialist society. None of the cases was known to be political.
After collecting local news reports of executions in the communist government's own provincial media from around the country, rights activist Gerardo Sanchez Cruz recently called on the government to declare ``a moratorium on the application of such an uncivilized sanction, as a first step toward the final prohibition of this practice.''
Foreign Ministry spokesman Rogelio Sierra on Thursday denied an earlier reports quoting Sanchez Cruz's declarations about new executions, calling them ``an absolute lie.''
However, Sanchez Cruz demonstrated what appeared to be faxed photocopies of recent stories in the government's own local press about the executions.
Asked about such reports, Sierra said: ``I have already stated my position.''
Sanchez Cruz is the brother of well-known human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez Cruz and with him a leading member of the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation.
``We are opposed to the death penalty,'' he said. ``We think it is uncivilized.''
In a package of press clippings included with a commission communique, a March 6 story in La Demajaqua, the government in Granma province, reported the execution of Francisco Javier Chavez Palacios for killing a Communist Party official.
A March 12 story in 26, the party's newspaper in the eastern province of Las Tunas, reported two executions. One man was convicted of trying to rape and then killing his 2-year-old nephew. The other man was convicted of trying to rape and then attempting to kill his 13-year-old stepdaughter. The girl survived.
Most of the others who were put to death were convicted of murder during robberies.
The clippings reported 10 executions in the last year, including eight in the last two months.
The commission's communique also said that two other executions had been reported in the last two months by the non-governmental -- and thus, illegal -- Cuba Press news agency, which cited prison sources in the eastern province of Cienfuegos.
The death penalty in Cuba has received renewed attention in recent months amid a government crackdown on crime and a toughening of the penal code.
Although revolutionary courts put hundreds to death in summary trials after Castro rose to power in early 1959, the death penalty has been used rarely in recent years.
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press