The 42-page report, released over the weekend in Washington, said Cuba cannot rejoin the hemispheric community as long as it clings to its Marxist-Leninist policies.
``The current government of Cuba remains incompatible with the principles and purposes of the inter-American system,'' the document said. The OAS suspended Cuba in 1962.
Ricardo Bofill, president of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, praised the report as ``one of the most complete documents ever published about the human rights situation in Cuba.''
``Neither Amnesty International nor the United Nations investigative commission that visited Cuba in 1988 ever wrote a report like this one,'' he said Tuesday in Miami.
The report cited the ``particular seriousness'' of the downing by Cuban warplanes of two Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue planes in February 1996 that killed four civilian fliers.
The commission said it has received ``numerous accusations describing violations by agents of the Cuban state of [civilians'] right to life.'' It said six people were killed while in police custody and that the alleged crimes were neither investigated nor punished by authorities.
``The Cuban state is responsible before the world not only for the commission of these illicit acts but also for the omission'' of justice, the document said.
The commission cited overcrowding in the island's prisons and what it called appalling sanitation, shortages and poor quality of food, inadequate medical care, beatings, solitary confinement, indiscriminate mixing of criminal and political prisoners an d restrictions on family visits.
Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald