HAVANA, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Two Cuban dissidents, including Oscar Elias Biscet detained since November after trying to organise an anti-government march, are to go on trial for an earlier anti-abortion protest and face two to three years in jail, one of them said on Friday.
Migdalia Rosado told reporters in Havana that she and Biscet, a medical doctor turned anti-Castro activist, had been charged with ``public disorder'' for staging an anti-abortion protest outside a hospital in February, 1999.
``There is no date for the trial yet,'' Rosado said. She showed reporters the formal charge notification from the state prosecutor which named her and Biscet as co-defendants.
The prosecution was seeking a three-year jail sentence for Biscet and two years for Rosado.
Rosado has been at liberty for most of the past year but Biscet was arrested early in November after trying to organise a protest march against President Fidel Castro's government ahead of a summit of Ibero-American heads of state in Havana.
Castro himself has denounced Biscet as a ``counter- revolutionary'' trouble-maker and has accused him of acting on the orders of the U.S. government, which is pressing for an end to one-party communist rule in Cuba.
The prosecutor alleged Biscet and Rosado created a public disorder on Feb. 22, 1999 by parading outside a maternity hospital in Havana's 10 de Octubre district with placards reading ``No to Abortion'' and ``No to the Death Penalty.'' Abortion is freely available under Cuba's public health
system.
Foreign diplomats noted, however, that the same prosecution charge sheet made a point of identifying Biscet as ``the leader of a counter-revolutionary group, the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights,'' named after his home neighbourhood.
It added he ``only had relations with anti-social elements, ex-convicts and counter-revolutionaries'' and accused him of supplying ``false and distorted information'' about Cuba's socialist revolution to ``subversive'' radio stations in Miami.
Rosado was also identified in the charges as associating with ``elements hostile to the revolutionary process.''
Cuba's authorities are sensitive to foreign accusations that they repress political opposition and so sometimes seek to prosecute dissidents for common, rather than political, crimes.
Havana does not accept the word ``dissident,'' saying all opponents are ``mercenaries'' and ``traitors'' who will be punished if they infringe Cuba's penal code.
14:49 02-04-00
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