Bush meets Cuban dissidents

WASHINGTON, May 20 (UPI) -- Eleven Cuban dissidents, some of them former prisoners, trooped to the White House Tuesday and held a 45-minute roundtable discussion with President George W. Bush on their experiences and hopes for their homeland, ruled by Fidel Castro for more than four decades.

The dissidents included Mario Chanes de Armas, 76, a former labor leader who joined with Castro in 1953, went to prison with him for his part in the failed attack on a military barracks in 1953, and who later fought with Castro in successfully toppling the regime of Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Castro later jailed him for 30 years -- longer than Nelson Mandela -- for complaining the revolution was turning communist, according to a White House fact sheet.

Ana Lazara Rodriguez, a doctor, spent 19 years in Castro's prisons, where she said there was torture and long periods of solitary confinement.

"What's important is that these things continue to happen in Cuba," she said.

"The world has to stand up" to stop it, not just the United States.

The roundtable coincided with the 101st anniversary of Cuban independence, granted by the United States a few years after U.S. forces and Cuban nationalists ejected Spain the Spanish-American War.

In a message in Spanish on Radio Marti, and directed toward Cuba, Bush expressed the hope that Cubans would come to enjoy freedoms similar to those of Americans.

"Dictatorships have no place in the Americas," he said.

U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Mel Martinez, who escaped from Cuba as a child, said the group of dissidents and relatives of currently imprisoned dissidents "represent the continuity of the suffering" of the Cuban people under Castro.

U.S.-Cuban relations have remained strained and minimal since Castro toppled Batista and established a communist regime.

Economic sanctions are still in place, despite calls from some in Congress for their easing for removal.

The Castro regime, however, is accused by Washington of widespread civil rights abuses, and earlier of having fostered terrorism in the region.

In March, Castro arrested more than 70 political dissidents in the country and sent them to prison. Earlier this month, Washington expelled 14 Cuban diplomats at the United Nations for actions not compatible with their diplomatic status -- in short, spying.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, in answer to a reporter's question, said Tuesday Washington "is always reviewing what the best policy is around the world, and that would include the best policies toward Cuba," when asked if tougher policies were envisaged.

A leading dissident in Cuba, Oswaldo Payá, told The New York Times he believes the Castro regime is using America's invasion of Iraq to justify its crackdown on regime opponents.