Wife Seeks Czech Legislator’s Release

The wife of a Czech lawmaker said Tuesday that she hopes the international community will help free her husband, who was accused of acts against Cuba’s national security and arrested along with another Czech after meeting with dissidents.

Lucie Pilipova has visited her husband, former Finance Minister Ivan Pilip, and fellow detainee Jan Bubenik several times since she arrived in Havana on Saturday.

“I believe in my husband, that he is innocent, and I hope that Cuban authorities will free him,” Pilipova told reporters in the lobby of a Havana hotel.

She said Cuban authorities charged her husband and Bubenik on Thursday with “acts against state security related to rebellion.”

A Cuban prosecutor told the men Sunday that they could expect to be held at least 60 days and then could be tried in court, she said. Pilipova said the men have yet to be assigned defense attorneys.

Pilip, 37, and Bubenik, 32, were arrested Jan. 12 in Ciego de Avila, about 210 miles southeast of Havana, after meeting with two dissidents there.

Pilip is a deputy in the Czech Parliament’s lower house. Bubenik was a student leader in the 1989 movement that toppled the Communist government.

The Czechs could be turned over to the Cuban courts for violating their tourist visas and for having “subversive contacts with members of counterrevolutionary groups,” the Cuban Communist Party daily Granma said last week in the government’s first and only comment on the arrests.

Those who “grossly violate our laws and try to conspire against the revolution do not have the right to impunity no matter what their titles or positions,” the newspaper said.

On Tuesday, Pilipova spoke as she sat next to Bubenik’s brother, Martin, who traveled with her to Havana.

Both prisoners “are very well, they are being treated very well,” Pilipova said.

She said Cuban authorities let them visit their jailed relatives at Havana’s Villa Marista prison every day for at least an hour, accompanied by an official and a Cuban translator.

The arrests came in the wake of a diplomatic spat involving Cuba and the Czech Republic.

Cuba’s government was enraged with the Czech Republic and Poland last April when both nations introduced a motion before the United Nations’ human rights body to censure the Communist island for its human rights record. The motion was later approved.

After the pair was arrested last week, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Kavan appealed to the European Union for help. Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman wrote a personal letter to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and President Vaclav Havel is reportedly asking Pope John Paul II to mediate.

The U.S. State Department condemned the detention last week.