By Vanessa Bauza
HAVANA BUREAU

HAVANA · Three Cuban military officers stunned dissident economist Martha Beatriz Roque on Thursday morning when they came to her cell in a Havana hospital and announced her 20-year prison sentence was suddenly lifted after only a year and four months.

Roque said officials did not place any conditions on her prison release and she would not have accepted any. The prominent opposition leader and former University of Havana professor said her first priority was to try to help free other imprisoned dissidents. She vowed to continue her work toward a transition in Cuba.

"I told [the officer] I was a dissident and that my ideas are completely different from theirs ... I was going to keep doing exactly as I had done when I went to prison," Roque, 58, said. "Prison does not erase ideas. I have lost 22 pounds, but my brain is the same."

Roque was the only woman arrested during the Cuban government's crackdown last spring, which sent 75 dissidents to prison for up to 28 years on charges that they conspired with U.S. diplomats to subvert Cuba's socialist system. Initially prosecutors had asked for a life sentence. During her one-day trial, Roque's longtime secretary, Aleida Godines, revealed herself to be an undercover state security agent and testified against her.

Roque is the seventh dissident of the group of 75 to be released since April because of deteriorating health. Cuba has about 300 political prisoners, according to an opposition source, the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

During the first four months of Roque's incarceration, she was placed in solitary confinement in the Manto Negro women's prison on the outskirts of Havana. After chest pains and high blood pressure, she was transferred to the Carlos J. Finlay military hospital, where she remained until Thursday.

Many human rights organizations as well as the Vatican, European Union and U.S. government were outraged over the Cuban crackdown, which some considered the worst in years. Roque thanked the international community for supporting her and the other political prisoners.

"I think really the international pressure on our behalf has been very big. The cost [of the crackdown for Cuba] has been greater than the utility of having us in prison," she said. "Our message is one of gratitude, but also one of continuity ... We have to keep fighting for a space in civil society."

Roque spent three years in prison in the late 1990s after she and three colleagues published a pamphlet calling for greater freedoms. After her release in 2000, she compiled monthly bulletins advocating economic reforms and launched what she described as the first dissident Web site directed from Cuba. The Cuban government promptly blocked it.

On Thursday, Roque looked fit and was in good spirits. As she talked to friends and international reporters, she joked that her once-blond hair was now streaked with gray because she was not allowed to dye it in prison. She said she spent her days at the military hospital doing crossword puzzles and reading. Although another prominent independent economist, Oscar Espinosa Chepe, was in the next cell, she said she never saw him.

Elsa Morejon, whose husband, Oscar Elias Biscet, is in solitary confinement and serving a 25-year sentence, was among the supporters who greeted Roque.

She said she was heartened by Roque's release.

"One of the most positive signs the Cuban government has given is to liberate Martha Beatriz Roque," Morejon said. "I continue to be positive about my husband because he is innocent."

Opposition leader Elizardo Sanchez, who heads the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, called Roque's release "good news" but said it does not indicate a softening on the part of Cuba's government.

"The repressive position of the government continues to be the same," Sanchez said.

Vanessa Bauza can be reached at vmbauza1@yahoo.com.

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