Cuba allows dissident meeting

President Fidel Castro's communist government allowed an unprecedented opposition meeting to take place on Friday, but expelled European legislators and reporters to prevent them attending.

Italy and Spain summoned the Cuban ambassadors in Rome and Madrid to explain the expulsions, which could hurt Havana's ties with the European Union that are already complicated by human rights concerns.

Some 200 dissidents chanted "Freedom, Freedom" and "Down with Fidel Castro" at the meeting in a fruit orchard on the outskirts of Havana as they called for democratic change in Cuba and the release of political prisoners.

It was the first general meeting of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society, a US-backed umbrella organisation that joins dozens of small dissident groups across Cuba.

A handful of American and European diplomats attended the meeting, but observers who came from Europe for the event on tourist visas were detained by police and ejected from Cuba.

A reporter for the Italy's Corriere della Sera, Francesco Battistini, was detained on his way to the meeting and put on a plane to Europe, the Italian Foreign Ministry said.

Cuba expelled three Polish journalists on Friday on a flight to Cancun, Mexico, a Polish diplomat said. They were among six Poles arrested at their Havana hotel on Thursday night.

The group, in Cuba to attend the dissidents' meeting, included a photographer, a translator and an expert on Cuban politics.

Two former Spanish senators were deported on Thursday, a day after arriving in Cuba for the meeting, and another legislator was expelled on Friday, officials said in Madrid. Police picked up Czech Senator Karel Schwarzenberg and German Bundestag member Arnold Vaatz at their hotels on Thursday and drove them straight to the airport for flights home.

Dissident economist Martha Beatriz Roque, who organised the meeting, said the expulsions showed the world the "totalitarian" nature of Castro's government.

"No state, no regime, no party has the right to control a whole nation. That is why we are here," she told the meeting, which debated plans for a democratic society in Cuba.

Roque, who has spent four of the last eight years in jail, said it was the first such gathering since Castro seized power in a 1959 revolution. She said police had harassed delegates to keep them from travelling to Havana. An attempt by Castro opponents to meet in 1996 was called off after police arrested most of its leaders.

US President George W. Bush praised the dissidents for their courage in coming out of the "shadow of repression" in a video message played to the meeting from a laptop computer. Bush said his administration, which last year stepped up restrictions on travel and cash remittances to Cuba, will keep working to hasten political change on the island.

"We will not rest. We will keep the pressure on until the Cuban people enjoy the same freedom in Havana that they have in America," he said.

Cubans attending the gathering, including wives of jailed dissidents, were excited by their first meeting. Cubans watching from the street shouted "Freedom" and flashed victory signs.

But Cuba's small dissident movement, which is recovering from a crackdown in March 2003, remains badly divided and silenced by censorship in the island's state-run media.