HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba will free seven of 59 dissidents imprisoned since 2003, a move that opponents of ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro said reflects a "climate of change" under his brother's rule.
The first releases of jailed dissidents since August were negotiated by Spain on health grounds and announced by Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos on Friday.
"The decision was made unilaterally by the Cuban authorities and we are very satisfied," Moratinos told Spanish radio from the city of Cordoba, noting that the move came after dialogue with Cuba.
The Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on its Web site that four of them will be sent to Spain with their families to receive medical treatment.
The four dissidents who will go to Spain have been gathered from different jails around Cuba in the Combinado del Este prison on the outskirts of Havana. They are Omar Pernet, Jose Gabriel Ramon Castillo, Alejandro Gonzalez and Pedro Pablo Alvarez.
"We hope ours are not the only releases," Alvarez, 60, told Reuters by telephone from the prison. "The four of us are well. They've treated us well. We don't know when they will free us; it could be today or tomorrow," he said.
The dissidents were arrested in a political crackdown ordered by Cuban leader Fidel Castro in March 2003 that put 75 of his opponents in prison with sentences of up to 28 years.
'CLIMATE OF CHANGE'
Sixteen had already been freed on health grounds. One of them, economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, said the new releases were a step in the right direction by acting President Raul Castro, who has been running Cuba since Fidel Castro was sidelined by illness in July 2006. He has not appeared in public since.
"This is a rational step by the Cuban government and by the reformist sectors within that want change," Espinosa Chepe said. "It reflects a climate of change and will benefit that climate of change," he said.
Another dissident, Manuel Cuesta Morua, said the government of Raul Castro was responding to requests by the international community for improved respect for human rights in Cuba.
The releases show that a strategy of dialogue and engagement of Cuba's communist government advocated by Spain within the European Union is paying off with "concrete results," Morua said.
Cuba's main rights group, the illegal but tolerated Cuban Commission for Human Rights, says there were 234 political prisoners in Cuba at the end of 2007, down from 283 a year earlier, indicating a drop in the number of Cubans behind bars for political reasons since Raul Castro took over.
Last August, Cuba released its longest-serving political prisoner, Francisco Chaviano Gonzalez, a former mathematics professor and rights activist who had spent more than 13 years in jail.
Morua said more releases can be expected as Havana prepares to sign the U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and a similar pact on economic and social rights by next month. This would oblige Cuba to accept regular U.N. monitoring of its human rights record from 2009.
The Cuban government does not allow the International Red Cross access to its prisons. It denies holding any political prisoners and labels dissidents "counter-revolutionary mercenaries" on the payroll of its arch-enemy, the United States.
(Reporting by Jason Webb in Madrid and Anthony Boadle in Havana; editing by Eric Walsh)
