Cuban courts convict rebels in sudden crackdown

HAVANA -- Cuban courts have convicted at least 74 government opponents in lightning-fast trials aimed at quashing dissent on the communist island, human rights activists said Wednesday.\nThe known sentences for 57 of those tried reportedly ranged from 6 to 28 years. The remaining sentences are expected by week's end. None of the trials has lasted more than one day, activists said, and there were no reports of acquittals.\nThe government published a brief statement on Wednesday's front page of the Communist Party daily newspaper Granma saying the defendants were tried "for their known participation in mercenary activities and other acts against the independence or the territorial integrity of the Cuban state."\nThe statement, the government's first public comment on the trials, confirmed that the trials began Thursday and sentences varied between 6 and 28 years. It did not say how many people were tried.\nThe crackdown, which ended several years of relative tolerance during President Fidel Castro's rule, began when Cuban officials accused the head of the American mission in Havana, James Cason, of actively supporting the island's opposition.\nThe government said independent journalists -- along with pro-democracy activists, opposition party leaders and other dissidents -- collaborated with U.S. diplomats to undermine the socialist state.\nWithout precise information from the government, human rights activists lowered the number of defendants Wednesday from 75 to 74.\nFour of those arrested in the crackdown were prosecuted on lesser crimes and received sentences measured in months rather than years, veteran activist Elizardo Sanchez said Tuesday. He was among the few leading government opponents not arrested last month.\nInternational condemnation of the trials continued, with Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa and the governments of Mexico, Canada and Sweden voicing protest Tuesday.\nThe crackdown is "the natural expression of a dictatorship that has been oppressing human rights for years," Vargas Llosa said.\nSome of the longest sentences were reserved for independent journalists, including 27 years for reporter and photographer Omar Rodriguez Saludes and 20 years each for poet and writer Raul Rivero, magazine editor Ricardo Gonzalez and economics writer Oscar Espinosa Chepe.\nA lawsuit on behalf of Rodriguez Saludes was filed in U.S. District Court in Miami on Monday, accusing Castro and other Cuban leaders of torture and unfairly convicting him in a closed-door trial.\nThe lawsuit is based partly on the Alien Tort Claims Act, which lets foreign residents sue in U.S. courts those who break "the law of nations or a treaty of the United States."\nThere was no immediate reaction to the lawsuit from Cuban officials in Havana. The Cuban Interests Section in Washington did not return a call Tuesday seeking comment.\nThe trials also were condemned by international rights and press groups, who said they violated universal norms.\n"They were carried out in flagrant contradiction of international treaties that protect the right to free expression and legal process," the PEN International writers group said in a letter sent Tuesday to Castro.\nCason has denied accusations that the U.S. mission had local dissidents on its payroll, saying the mission operates no differently than American embassies in other countries.