Cuba dissidents plan historic meeting
European Union observers turned away
From Lucia Newman
CNN
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HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) -- Workmen Thursday were putting the final touches on tile floors and toilets built in the back yard of a Cuban dissident, the venue for what would be -- if police don't stop it -- an unprecedented meeting of opponents of Cuba's communist government.
The two-day Assembly to Promote Civil Society is to start Friday, which until the 1959 revolution was celebrated as Cuba's Independence Day.
If it is allowed to go ahead, it will be a first for dissident groups' attempts to bring together several hundred diverse opposition organizations -- all of them outlawed by the government.
Assembly organizer and former political prisoner Marta Beatriz Roque, considered a hard-liner, said more than 350 dissident organizations will be represented at the meeting, which is supposed to draw up a democratic transition plan for Cuba.
"It's a point of departure and a historic move," said Roque, who said she has invited international observers such as the former presidents of the Soviet Union and Poland -- Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa -- to attend.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution "extending its support and solidarity to the participants of the historic meeting" and "urging the international community to support the assembly and its mission to bring democracy and human rights to Cuba."
The U.S. Treasury Department has even granted travel licenses to anti-Castro Cuban-Americans who want to attend.
But signaling its unwillingness to tolerate overseas observers, Cuban immigration authorities turned back two Polish European Union deputies who tried to enter the country Tuesday to witness the assembly.
Cuba's communist government accused assembly organizers of being "mercenaries in the pay of the USA," a charge they strongly deny.
"We have funded the assembly with donations from our brothers and sisters in the exile community. None of the $25,000 we have received comes from the U.S. government," said dissident Rene Gomez Manzano.
Asked by CNN to comment on the planned assembly, President Fidel Castro said, "Those who attack us don't represent more than a fraction of 1 percent. ... You [the foreign news media] have helped create them."
The meeting has also underscored the deep and often bitter divisions among Cuba's opposition movement.
Several outlawed political groups said they will not attend because the event is backed by Miami-based exile groups that support violence. Many of the wives of political prisoners said they won't go because they consider the assembly "provocative" and counterproductive.
Another key dissident, Oswaldo Paya of the pro-democracy Varela Project, has denounced the meeting as "a fraud against the opposition," organized by "extremists whose movement has in the past been infiltrated and influenced by Cuban state security agents."
Meanwhile, anti-Castro Cuban militant Luis Posada Carriles was charged Thursday with illegally entering the United States and ordered held for a June hearing in Texas. He was detained near Miami, Florida, on Tuesday by U.S. immigration agents. (Full story)
