Dissident Petition Ignored at Meeting of Cuban Legislature

Cuba’s National Assembly met Saturday but did not discuss a pending dissident petition for moderate reforms of the island’s one-party Communist government.

The rubber-stamp legislature, which meets twice a year for a few days, unanimously approved a law granting private agricultural cooperatives greater profit incentives to spur food production in the economically battered country.

Dissidents on Thursday called on the assembly to debate their petition for political and economic reforms that they presented in May, backed by more than 11,000 signatures. But assembly members said it was not on the agenda.

President Fidel Castro, whose government has so far ignored the petition known as the Varela Project, lashed out at his enemies at the opening session of the 600-member assembly.

“They are like fish out of water. There is no oxygen for counterrevolution,” Castro, 76, and in power since the 1959 revolution, told the assembly.

“They are ideologically defeated. They have no weapons to face the revolution. All they have is hypocrisy and lies,” he said.

The Varela Project calls for legal reforms to ensure freedom of expression and assembly, the right to own a private business and the release of political prisoners, said to number 230 by human rights groups. It proposes that the reforms be put to Cubans in a referendum.

The reform petition is led by Christian Democrat Oswaldo Paya, who last month won the European Parliament’s top human rights award.

Most Cubans first heard of the petition when former President Carter praised it in a speech in Havana in May that was broadcast live on Cuba’s state-run media.

Castro’s government responded by marshaling millions of signatures to push through amendments to the Cuban Constitution that cast in concrete the socialist nature of the workers’ state. The authorities have ignored requests that the dissident petition be published for public debate.