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To Dissidents, Glasnost in Cuba Means Arrest

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Times Staff Writer

Cuban political police seized about a dozen political dissidents in pre-dawn raids on their homes Tuesday, foiling plans for an appeal to visiting Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to press for glasnost -style reforms in Cuba.

Several of the dissidents, members of of an illegal opposition group called the Human Rights Party, had been arrested in a midnight raid a week ago and fined for publishing a one-sheet newsletter called “Franqueza,” the Spanish word for glasnost, or openness.

On Sunday, the group had announced plans for a peaceful demonstration Tuesday night in front of the Soviet Embassy. Members said they intended to present welcoming flowers to Gorbachev on the Soviet leader’s last night in Havana and to urge him to support reforms in President Fidel Castro’s government similar to those now under way in the Soviet Union.

‘Hundreds of People’

“They hoped the demonstration would encourage hundreds of people to join them spontaneously, in contrast to the organized welcome of the government (when) it was all slogans and no one could say anything,” explained Elizardo Sanchez, leader of the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Conciliation, a human rights group that apparently is tolerated by the government because it scrupulously claims only humanitarian but no political goals.

Two members of Sanchez’s human rights group were among the 10 to 12 persons arrested early Tuesday, but it was believed they were seized because of their political activism rather than for their human rights activities. One of them, Esteban Gonzalez y Gonzalez, a 58-year-old high school mathematics teacher, had announced formation of his own political party, the Movement for Democratic Integration, on the eve of Gorbachev’s arrival in Havana.

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The leader of the avowedly political Human Rights Party, who was taken from his Havana home at 4 a.m., is Samuel Martinez Lara, 38, a non-practicing psychiatrist who took public health training at UC Berkeley in the 1970s. Along with Martinez Lara and Gonzalez, according to Sanchez and other human rights sources in Havana, police arrested another activist, Evita Cruz Rodriguez, as well as an engineer who tried vainly to run in a government-rigged local election a few weeks ago, Roberto Bahamonde.

Two others, David Moya and Hiram Abid Cobas, who hold the No. 2 and 3 leadership posts in Martinez Lara’s party, also were named, but the identities of the remaining four to six people reportedly under arrest were unknown.

A government official would confirm only that Martinez Lara had been arrested for what he called “preparing unauthorized activities.”

Targeted by Police

Martinez Lara, a former political prisoner who has been targeted by police twice before in recent months, may have aroused particular government anger when he complained in an interview with CBS television’s anchorman Dan Rather earlier this week that Castro’s is “the most cruel and oppressive regime on the American continent.”

“Their (the government’s) motives are obvious,” Sanchez said. “It is a covert operation by the political police to break up the peaceful demonstration in front of the Soviet Embassy this evening.”

The demonstration later was canceled.

Dissident political activity is relatively new to Cuba, although in reaction to international pressure the government has tolerated the existence of two human rights groups for the past two years.

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Recently, in addition to Gonzalez’s openly political Movement for Democratic Integration, there have been reports of other clandestine groups.

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