Fidel Castro Ruz
President
Palacio del Gobierno
Havana Cuba

Dear Mr. President:

We have watched with great distress and disappointment as your government and security forces carried out its massive crackdown against dissidents in Cuba in recent weeks. We are especially disturbed by the current show trials staged to somehow legitimize the imprisonment of the country's leading independent journalists. These summary affairs ended quickly and predictably with trumped up verdicts of guilt and harsh prison sentences. The process makes a mockery of Cuban justice and due process.

Many of those on trial are guilty of nothing more than exercising their basic right to free speech and movement, including contact with U.S. diplomats there, especially James Cason, head of the U.S. mission. While Mr. Cason and the U.S. administration he represents are clearly hostile to you and your government, he has no more control over the Cuban citizens you arrested than he does U.S. editors and journalists, who also have met with him in Havana. To many, it appears your anger at Mr. Cason and the policies he represents has been misdirected against your own citizens.

Since the end of the Cold War, your government has been seen by many impartial witnesses as warily accepting a new level of openness, with growing tolerance for dissent and activity among individual citizens who do not support you or your policies. An increase in the number of resident U.S. journalists working in Cuba is a reflection of increased openness. These latest actions represent a crushing setback to such progress. Such repression only serves to further isolate Cuba from the family of democratic nations that promote the rule of law and human rights. For many who now watch Cuba from the outside, your most recent actions recall the more repressive characteristics of the Cold War.

We urge you to issue an immediate amnesty for the more than 28 independent journalists who have suffered arrest, detention and prosecution. We also urge you to discard the politics of intolerance and accept the Cuban people's desire for a free and independent press that allows the gathering and dissemination of news outside the state-controlled media.

Signed,

Diane H. McFarlin
ASNE President

Peter K. Bhatia
ASNE Vice President

Karla Garrett Harshaw
ASNE Secretary

Rick Rodriguez
ASNE Treasurer

Edward L. Seaton
ASNE Foundation President

Robert Rivard
ASNE International Committee Chair