Said1
Gold Member
By Anthony Boadle
HAVANA (Reuters) - President Fidel Castro's communist government allowed an unprecedented opposition meeting to take place on Friday, but expelled European legislators and reporters to prevent them attending.
Italy and Spain summoned the Cuban ambassadors in Rome and Madrid to explain the expulsions, which could hurt Havana's ties with the European Union that are already complicated by human rights concerns.
Some 200 dissidents chanted "Freedom, Freedom" and "Down with Fidel Castro" at the meeting in a fruit orchard on the outskirts of Havana as they called for democratic change in Cuba and the release of political prisoners.
It was the first general meeting of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society, a U.S.-backed umbrella organization that joins dozens of small dissident groups across Cuba.
A handful of American and European diplomats attended the meeting, but observers who came from Europe for the event on tourist visas were detained by police and ejected from Cuba.
A reporter for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Francesco Battistini, was detained on his way to the meeting and put on a plane to Europe, the Italian foreign ministry said.
Cuba expelled three Polish journalists Friday on a flight to Cancun, Mexico, a Polish diplomat said. They were among six Poles arrested at their Havana hotel Thursday night. The group, in Cuba to attend the dissidents' meeting, included a photographer, a translator and an expert on Cuban politics.
Two former Spanish senators were deported on Thursday, a day after arriving in Cuba for the meeting, and another legislator was expelled on Friday, officials said in Madrid.
Police picked up Czech Sen. Karel Schwarzenberg and German Bundestag member Arnold Vaatz at their hotels on Thursday and drove them straight to the airport for flights home.
Dissident economist Martha Beatriz Roque, who organized the meeting, said the expulsions showed the world the "totalitarian" nature of Castro's government.
"No state, no regime, no party has the right to control a whole nation. That is why we are here," she told the meeting, which debated plans for a democratic society in Cuba.
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