After the Miami-based Cubanet posted this column on the Internet, Viera was arrested on charges of defaming a government official. His Nov. 27 trial was postponed when pro-Viera demonstrators clashed with government supporters in the street outside the Havana courtroom.

HAVANA, June 1998 -- When people devoid of ethics demand that others abide by ethics, or ask others to do what they themselves would not, they're said to -- in the Cuban vernacular -- ``moralize in their undershorts.''

An example of underwear morality recently was provided by the Foreign Ministry's chief attorney, Jose Peraza Chapeau, addressing a conference of plenipotentiaries gathered in Rome for the creation of the International Criminal Court.

Aside from the fact that the suggestions of Fidel Castro's representative were aimed at castrating the jurisdictional capabilities of the court, Peraza Chapeau's proposal that the court become ``an independent entity by its own competence and by the impartiality that characterizes the function of imparting justice'' is so paradoxical that you have to doff your hat to his oratorical skill.

The court should not be subordinate to the U.N. Security Council, Peraza Chapeau contended, as he clearly stated the Cuban government's position that the court must be impartial, independent, efficacious, and free. I don't know if any of the circumspect plenipotentiaries who listened to such ``morality in undershorts'' thought about blowing him an irreverent razz close up.

If someone had sounded a razz to shush such demagogic gibberish, that person would have been in the right, because Castro's government does not observe in Cuba what it is demanding in the international arena.

Anyone who pores carefully over the organizational laws of the Cuban judicial system and the criminal-trial laws will appreciate that Cuba's criminal courts are not ``impartial, independent, efficacious, and free.''

It is an unavoidable condition that to sit on the bench, a Cuban judge must identify politically and ideologically with the government's policy. The same law demands that the courts periodically submit an account of their activities to the Assemblies of the People's Power. Courts in Cuba are subordinate to the Council of State and lack even jurisprudential faculty, which in Cuba belongs only to the Council of State.

So what self-respecting representative of a foreign government at an international forum would pay the least attention to the Castro government's plenipotentiary? The best that could happen is that someone will drop into Peraza Chapeau's hat a note saying: ``Begin at home. First sweep your cobwebs, then come check the dust on our shelves.''

Let's hope that the Cuban government will be stirred by its own gospel in Rome and establish in Cuba an independent and impartial judicial system.

That system ought to have judges who are tied to justice and righteousness, not to the Communist Party's political line. It ought to have courts that observe the law and guide themselves by their own standards, free from the control of another state power -- be it the Council of State or its National Assembly of the People's Power.