A United Nations human rights envoy said today dozens of Cuban dissidents were being held in alarming conditions following their imprisonment in a crackdown early last year.
French magistrate Christine Chanet, appointed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to probe alleged Cuban abuses, also said her appeals to President Fidel Castro to pardon the dissidents had gone unanswered.
"The personal representative of the High Commissioner has received particularly alarming information about the conditions of detention of these people," Ms Chanet said in her first report on the situation in Cuba.
According to the reports, prisoners were being frequently transferred from one prison to another, often far from their families, which made visits difficult, Ms Chanet said.
They were being placed in "trying" physical and psychological conditions, whether it be in isolation cells or crammed together with "common criminals", she added.
Cuba triggered a storm of international protest last April when it sentenced some 75 dissidents, some of them over 60 years old, to between six and 28 years in jail on charges of conspiring with the United States to overthrow the Communist-run government.