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Spain's Ex-leader Blasts Castro NewsMax WiresPRAGUE, Czech Republic - Dozens of political prisoners in Cuba should be freed, former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar said Friday at an international conference examining ways to support resistance to Fidel Castro's regime. Aznar said he was "not going to remain silent," while "in Cuba people are held prisoner simply because they have a different opinion from the official line." Story Continues Below He addressed the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba, which opened a three-day meeting here Friday. The group aims to unite opponents of Castro's regime. Participants highlighted the case of Raúl Rivero, a jailed Cuban dissident journalist and author. "There's nothing to justify that people like Raúl Rivero should be imprisoned just because they wrote a critical poem against a dictator," Aznar said. Rivero was arrested in March 2003 along with 74 others in a crackdown on the opposition. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of working with U.S. diplomats to undermine Cuba's socialist system -- allegations both he and Washington have denied. The committee was founded a year ago by former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who was a leading dissident during his own country's communist times. The communist regime in Czechoslovakia, which later split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, fell in 1989. Havel repeatedly has expressed support for human-rights activists in Cuba. His committee brings together mostly former top-ranking politicians and diplomats from around the world also are part of the committee. The group was formed as a response to Castro's crackdown. "I think that the situation in Cuba will change quite soon," Havel told the conference, adding that he hoped it will happen peacefully. Havel said, however, that his advice to pro-democracy activists in Cuba was not to think only about how to get rid of the dictatorship, but rather what will happen next. Speaking about his own experience after the fall of communism here, he said: "When we all of a sudden took power, we didn't know in a way what to do because we were not ready enough." "Many people just thought that when they got rid of a dictator they would live in a paradise," Havel said. "That's not true," he said, warning that the road to a free society is "difficult and takes a lot of time."
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