HAVANA, Nov 30 (AFP) - Cuba on Tuesday freed a fourth and fifth regime opponent in a two-day period, and newly released journalist-poet Raul Rivero urged dialogue over international pressure.
"I would advise dialogue. I have always believed in dialogue. It seems to me, as a citizen, that dialogues are better than pressure," Rivero, who had been serving a 20 year jail term, told journalists in his modest Havana flat.
Three dissidents were set free Monday, including Oscar Espinosa Chepe, who was jailed as part of the government`s most sweeping crackdown in years in 2003.
Rivero, 59, and Osvaldo Alfonso Valdes were freed Tuesday. All of the five were among 75 dissidents jailed last March and April for between seven and 28 years after a crackdown by President Fidel Castro`s communist government.
The dissidents were set free following a meeting last Thursday between Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and Spain`s ambassador to Cuba, Carlos Alonso Zaldivar.
The meeting marked the first official contact between Cuba and the European Union since June 2003, when EU officials imposed sanctions protesting the crackdown and the executions of three Cubans convicted of trying to hijack a ferry to the United States.
Eleven dissidents from the group of 75 have been released over the past several months.
Rivero said he hoped he would be able to write and work as a journalist in Cuba where all media are state controlled.
"I have never wanted to leave here," he told reporters. "I am thinking about looking for a place to go work, teach, do something so that I can write the books I have to write."
He told reporters he was a free man "without rage, with a position that is constructive rather than belligerant; I don`t have hatreds, or at least not great ones."
Rivero, who in 2003 was awarded a UNESCO freedom of speech award for his activist work, said his and the other three releases were not the fruit of international pressure but rather "a private government initiative -- a gesture."
Rivero was transferred to a prison hospital in Havana from his prison in Canaletas, 450 kilometers (280 miles) east of the capital prior to his release.
Considered one of the best poets of his generation in Cuba, Rivero in recent years turned to journalism to spotlight the lack of civil rights on the island. Many of his articles were published in the US state of Florida, home to some 800,000 Cuban-Americans.
In 1995, he founded the independent news agency Cuba Press, harshly criticizing Castro`s government and disillusioned with the direction taken by the Revolution which he had defended for decades in poems and news stories.
After the government crackdown, international pressure from governments and rights organizations sought to prod Castro to free the dissidents.
Rivero`s wife Blanca Reyes struggled over his 20-month incarceration to keep pressure on and keep his situation in the public eye, highlighting the fragile state of the poet`s health.
In Brussels the European Union (EU) on Tuesday welcomed the release of three dissidents prior to Rivero, but said it wanted more.
"We interpret this release as a unilateral move on Cuba`s part that we welcome," said Amadeu Altafaj, spokesman for EU cooperation commissioner Louis Michel.
"This is a more constructive approach," he said. But he added: "We are awaiting new releases ... we are awaiting developments."
11/30/2004 18:38 GMT - AFP