May 5, 1999
HAVANA, May 4 (Reuters) - A human rights group in Cuba said on Tuesday at least 10 people had been executed by the authorities so far this year, a sharp increase over 1998, and it called for an international campaign to halt further executions.
``The fact that in little less than three months the penalty of death by firing squad has been carried out against at least 10 people ... concerns us greatly,'' the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation said in a statement distributed to foreign correspondents in Havana.
It called on foreign governments, non-government groups and personalities to launch a campaign to persuade Cuba's communist government to halt the executions as a first step toward eventually abolishing capital punishment.
The statement, signed by one of the group's leaders, Gerardo Sanchez Santa Cruz, said this tally of 10 executions in 1999 compared with only two reported in 1998. The group gathered their figures using official reports from local media.
In February, Cuba's National Assembly passed modifications toughening the existing penal code and extending the existing death penalty to cover violent robberies or attacks against persons of authority and violent abuse of children.
The rights commission, which monitors human rights issues in Cuba but is not formally recognised by the government, listed 12 people it said were currently under sentence of death, awaiting the results of appeal processes.
This included two Salvadoran nationals, Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon and Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerena, condemned to death earlier this year for their part in a 1997 bombing campaign against hotels in Cuba which killed an Italian visitor.
The Cuban authorities said the bombings were masterminded by a leading Miami-based anti-communist Cuban exile group.
The commission noted that Cuba's penal code stipulated that the death penalty should be applied as an exceptional measure and only in the most serious cases.
It included as evidence to back its charges copies of articles from official local newspapers reporting the executions, several of which took place in eastern Cuba in March and April this year. Most of the the cases mentioned appeared to refer to crimes of murder with extreme or brutal violence.
In one case in eastern Granma province, a man was executed in early March for stabbing to death a local Communist Party official after a fight over a bicycle collision.
On March 5, two men were executed in Las Tunas province, one for stabbing and trying to rape his 13-year-old step- daughter, who survived the attack, and another for beating and killing a two-year-old child whom he also tried to rape.
The death sentences handed down this year but still pending execution included one against a man in Santiago de Cuba who stabbed to death a police lieutenant before robbing him.
The commission also listed the case of Humberto Eladio Real Suarez, who was sentenced to death in April, 1996 for shooting dead a man. Real Suarez had arrived on Cuba's northern coast as a part of a raiding party of armed Cuban exiles.
His companions were all jailed but his death sentence had not yet been carried out and no date had been set for an appeal hearing, the commission said.
17:35 05-04-99
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited
[ BACK TO THE NEWS ]