Witnesses: Cuban dissidents beaten, arrested in church

HAVANA, Cuba (CNN) -- Cuban state security agents followed anti-government protesters into a Catholic Church this week, detaining about a dozen dissidents after hitting and kicking some of them, according to witnesses.

Some 25 dissidents marched peacefully to a church Tuesday in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba to request a Mass for a dissident arrested earlier in the week, said Elizardo Sanchez, a leading dissident based in Havana.

Sanchez said state security officers attacked the protesters when they arrived at the church and many of them ran inside.

"The repressors, headed by a lieutenant colonel and other state security officers, desecrated the church of Santa Teresita after kicking open one of the doors and savagely attacking the peaceful dissidents," he said in a statement.

He said officers "punched, kicked and used pepper gas." Five dissidents remain in detention, he added.

The Cuban government did not immediately respond to the accusations. It considers the splintered dissident groups "mercenaries" who receive money from the "enemy government" in Washington to undermine the Cuban revolution.

"It was a deployment of violence," the Rev. Jose Conrado Rodriguez, the church's priest, said by telephone. He said he was taking a bath when he heard screams coming from the church annex, where he leads larger services.

He said the dissidents already had been detained when he made it downstairs but witnesses told him the officers had used "violence and gas" against about a dozen protesters.

The priest said he demanded an explanation but that a lieutenant colonel merely told him relations between the state and church were good.

"While we weren't involved in the protest, it pains us that people of authority used violence in our own home," he said. "They should recognize that they made a mistake."

Communist Cuba frowned on religion for decades, but relations between the Catholic Church and government warmed after Pope John Paul II's visit in 1998. E-mail to a friend

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