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.
People with missing teeth might be able to grow new ones, said Japanese dentists, who are testing a pioneering drug they hope will offer an alternative to dentures and implants. Unlike reptiles and fish, which usually replace their fangs on a regular basis, it is widely accepted that humans and most other mammals only grow two sets of teeth. However, hidden underneath our gums are the dormant buds of a third generation, said Katsu Takahashi, head of oral surgery at the Medical Research Institute Kitano Hospital in Osaka, Japan. His team launched clinical trials at Kyoto University Hospital in October, administering an experimental
IVY LEAGUE GRADUATE: Suspect Luigi Nicholas Mangione, whose grandfather was a self-made real-estate developer and philanthropist, had a life of privilege The man charged with murder in the killing of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare made it clear he was not going to make things easy on authorities, shouting unintelligibly and writhing in the grip of sheriff’s deputies as he was led into court and then objecting to being brought to New York to face trial. The displays of resistance on Tuesday were not expected to significantly delay legal proceedings for Luigi Nicholas Mangione, who was charged in last week’s Manhattan killing of Brian Thompson, the leader of the US’ largest medical insurance company. Little new information has come out about motivation,
‘MONSTROUS CRIME’: The killings were overseen by a powerful gang leader who was convinced his son’s illness was caused by voodoo practitioners, a civil organization said Nearly 200 people in Haiti were killed in brutal weekend violence reportedly orchestrated against voodoo practitioners, with the government on Monday condemning a massacre of “unbearable cruelty.” The killings in the capital, Port-au-Prince, were overseen by a powerful gang leader convinced that his son’s illness was caused by followers of the religion, the civil organization the Committee for Peace and Development (CPD) said. It was the latest act of extreme violence by powerful gangs that control most of the capital in the impoverished Caribbean country mired for decades in political instability, natural disasters and other woes. “He decided to cruelly punish all
NOTORIOUS JAIL: Even from a distance, prisoners maimed by torture, weakened by illness and emaciated by hunger, could be distinguished Armed men broke the bolts on the cell and the prisoners crept out: haggard, bewildered and scarcely believing that their years of torment in Syria’s most brutal jail were over. “What has happened?” asked one prisoner after another. “You are free, come out. It is over,” cried the voice of a man filming them on his telephone. “Bashar has gone. We have crushed him.” The dramatic liberation of Saydnaya prison came hours after rebels took the nearby capital, Damascus, having sent former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad fleeing after more than 13 years of civil war. In the video, dozens of