Catholic Church prelates who held talks with Cuban President Raul Castro on Thursday said the Cuban leader seemed ready to discuss solving national problems, including the possible release of some political prisoners.
Cardinal Jaime Ortega and Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba Dionisio Garcia, who heads the Cuban Bishops’ Conference, both described as positive a four-and-a-half-hour meeting they held with Castro in Havana on Wednesday.
It was the Cuban Catholic Church leaders’ first talks with Castro since he took over the presidency of the communist-ruled nation from his ailing elder brother Fidel Castro in 2008.
“We discussed many issues of national reality,” Garcia said by telephone from eastern Santiago de Cuba.
This had included the plight of dissidents jailed by the government.
“I believe the government is ready to take measures toward resolving these problems,” Garcia added.
Ortega said: “The Church is interested in there being some kind of relief in the situation of the prisoners, which could include the freeing of some of them, and that is what we’re talking about.”
He said the subject was being discussed “seriously,” but neither he nor Garcia offered specific details of what steps the Cuban government might take over the political prisoners.
The cardinal added the talks would continue.
“It seems to me there is at the very least a climate of dialogue, in the sense that each part wants to solve this problem,” Garcia said, without elaborating.
The rare meeting, which received ample coverage in official media, followed Ortega’s successful mediation between the communist authorities and female relatives of imprisoned dissidents earlier this month.
That mediation resulted in the dissident group known as the “Ladies in White” resuming Sunday marches along a main Havana avenue free from harassment by government supporters.
State media on Thursday published an official government statement saying that in Wednesday’s meeting “various issues of mutual interest were analyzed, in particular the favorable development of relations between the Catholic Church and Cuban state and the current international and domestic situation.”
The Vatican’s foreign minister, Archbishop Dominique Memberti, is scheduled to visit Cuba next month amid increasing economic difficulties and international attention on human rights abuses.
Political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo died in February after a hunger strike. Another hunger striker, Guillermo Farinas Hernandez, has been hospitalized since March.
Memberti is expected to press authorities to release political prisoners, whom the government brands as mercenaries and subversives in the pay of the US.
Human rights organizations put the number of political prisoners in Cuba at about 200.
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