Former Polish president Walesa to hold Cuban solidarity rally

Former Polish president Walesa to hold Cuban solidarity rally

Monday, December 11, 2006

WARSAW, Poland (AFP): Former Polish president and Nobel Peace laureate
Lech Walesa will hold a conference to show solidarity with Cuban
dissidents on Monday, the Walesa Institute website reported Sunday.

Walesa, who helped found Solidarity, the first free trade union in the
communist block, said "it is extremely important for Poles to pay the
world back symbolically for its help" in rejecting the Soviet
Union-backed regime in Poland.

"Today, the Cuban people need this support to start to believe," he
explained.

Another former Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, along with ex-
political prisoner in Cuba, Paul Rivero, and Polish Senate leader,
Bogdan Borisewicz, will also attend the conference entitled "From
solidarity to democracy: can Cuba gain independence?".

Messages of support will be read by current Polish President, Lech
Kaczynski, Costa Rican President, Oscar Arias Sanchez, former Czech
leader, Vaclav Havel and ex-US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.

The US-based Human Rights Watch has reported that "Cubans are
systematically denied basic rights to free expression, association,
assembly, privacy, movement, and due process of law".

This year, Cuba detained 339 political prisoners, some 77 fewer than the
figure for 2005, according to a Cuban human rights organisation.

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