Workers' Rights Activists Repressed by Political Police

Text of interrupted telephone communiqué:

HAVANA, 7 July (BPIC) - State Security is employing detentions, threats and home arrests in Havana against members of the United Council of Cuban Workers (CUTC).

The repressive measures began on 20 June when Gilberto Figueredo Alvarez, a CUTC organizer, was walking together with a group of other workers' rights activists to a secret organizational meeting in the Vedado district. State Security officers accosted the men at the intersection of G and 27th Streets, and took them to the nearby SS facility for interrogation.

Authorities filed an official pre-arrest warning in Figueredo Alvarez's files, which they said was their "first and last warning" to him. The official in charge of the interrogation said that "in Cuba we're not going to allow independent workers' unions, because they're all CIA agents".

That day, State Security agents arrived at the work place of CUTC activist Raúl Rodríguez Blanco, warning him not to leave the premises at any time that day, in order to prevent his attendance at the meeting.

At the same time, CUTC activist Marcial Rodríguez Armenteros was the target of an Act of Repudiation [government-organized mobs which lay siege to dissidents' homes or work places as an act of psychological pressure]. He was later taken to the Revolutionary Police unit in Marianao for interrogation by counterintelligence officers, one of whom Rodríguez identified as a government infiltrator who in the early nineties became President of the opposition Cuban Democratic Coalition.

All three unionists were forbidden from leaving their homes for 48 hours afterwards.

On 23 June, Rodríguez was ordered to Unit Six of the Revolutionary Police, where a pre-arrest warning was also filed against him. During the interrogation, the officer in question verbally attacked him continuously and forbid him to...[NOTE: Telephone line was cut at this point.]