But human rights panel urges investigator after dissident crackdown

By TRACEY EATON / The Dallas Morning News

HAVANA – The top U.N. human rights body on Thursday refused to condemn Cuba for sending dozens of dissidents to jail this month after what critics described
as "sham trials."

The socialist government called the decision "a new moral victory for Cuba" and a defeat for the United States.

The 53-nation U.N. commission, meeting in Geneva, did adopt a milder resolution urging Cuba to allow a human rights investigator to visit the island.

The Bush administration applauded the move.

"The commission has sent the right signal to courageous Cubans who struggle daily to gain their basic political and civil freedoms," a White House statement said.
"We remain gravely concerned about the fate of scores of Cuban citizens who have been unfairly arrested, tried and sentenced for the crimes of speaking their
minds, holding discussions, and seeking an alternative to 44 years of repression and fear."

The Cuban government has been under fire for the dissident crackdown in March and the April 10 firing-squad executions of three Cuban men who had tried to
hijack a ferry to Florida just eight days earlier.

International human rights groups, South Florida's Cuban-American community, the U.S. government and nations from Chile and Peru to Japan and Germany
criticized the executions.

On Thursday, Costa Rica and other nations asked the U.N. commission to call for the Cuban dissidents' release and to express "deep concern" about the
executions. But that request was rejected.

Kevin Moley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. office in Geneva, said he was disappointed that there wasn't a stronger statement against Cuba's human rights
record.

The jailed dissidents include pro-democracy activists, journalists and librarians.

"Only Cuba, and a diminishing number of its totalitarian counterparts, could tremble at the 'threat' of library books and free access to the Internet, and call them
subversion," State Department official Lorne Craner told a U.S. House committee Wednesday.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque told reporters in Havana that extreme measures were needed against the dissidents and the hijackers.

"What's at stake in Cuba today is this: whether a small country near a great superpower can be an independent country ... and follow its own path."

U.S. officials finance, advise and instruct the political opposition on the island, he said.

Indeed, U.S. officials openly concede that their goal is to use the opposition and other tools to force Fidel Castro from power.

One of those tools is the 40-year-old American ban on trade with the island.

Cuban officials asked the U.N. commission to recommend lifting the ban, calling it a "flagrant violation of the human rights of the Cuban people, in particular their
right to food and health."

And some nations agreed.

"Argentina will not condemn Cuba, a small, blockaded country," Argentine President Eduardo Duhalde said. Doing so now, while the United States is engaged in
"this unilateral war" in Iraq, would be "very inopportune," he said in Geneva.

However, the commission rejected the Cuban measure also.

As for allowing human rights inspectors, Cuban officials have rejected that idea in the past, calling it a violation of national sovereignty. If any inspections are allowed
on the island, Cuban officials say, they should be on the conditions at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay in eastern Cuba, where prisoners captured in
Afghanistan are being held.

E-mail teaton@dallasnews.com