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Cuban forces storm church to detain political dissidents

Cuban security forces detained up to 15 dissidents after storming into a church's parish hall to stop an anti-government protest, the church's priest and a dissident group said on Wednesday.

The priest of Santa Teresita church in Santiago de Cuba, Jose Conrado Rodriguez, said at least five people were detained during the crackdown on Tuesday, in the Americas' only one-party communist-ruled state.

A leading dissident group said 15 people were rounded up by police in what it said was an "extremely serious act of political repression."

"They barged in spraying gas in the faces of people from those spray cans, and went about dishing out blows and shouting," Conrado Rodriguez said by telephone.

He said about 15 to 20 patrol cars turned up at the church, outside which some 600 people had gathered, many of them from a protest march that had just ended.

Some 25 dissidents dressed in black had walked inside the church to protest the arrest of another government opponent, said Elizardo Sanchez, president of the Cuban Human Rights and National Reconciliation Commission.

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

Sanchez, whose organization is outlawed but largely tolerated by the communist regime, later said that eight detainees had been let go by authorities, but that "seven remain under arrest."

He said the crackdown was an "extremely serious act of political repression with practically no precedent."

The commission said it "hopes the government will conduct a serious investigation and stop encouraging or allowing premeditated and unnecessary acts of police brutality against citizens trying to exercise their right to demonstrate."

Sanchez said the police action was part of "a policy of preventive repression" ahead of Human Rights Day on Monday when several opposition members have scheduled events.

A spokesman for Cuba's Catholic Bishops Conference said the police action inside a church was "unusual" and "very regrettable," adding that he hoped it proves to be "a very isolated incident."
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