Pope steps in as Castro purges his opponents

The Pope added his voice yesterday to the growing international criticism of Fidel Castro's Cuba after the recent sentencing of 75 dissidents to long prison terms and the summary execution of three hijackers who tried to commandeer a ferry to Florida.

"The Holy Father felt deeply pained when he learnt of the harsh sentences recently imposed on numerous Cuban citizens, and even, for some of them, the death penalty," the Vatican's Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, wrote in a letter sent earlier this month but only now made public.

Pope John Paul urged Mr Castro to consider a "significant gesture of clemency". "Such an act will contribute to create a climate of greater détente to the benefit of the dear Cuban people," the letter added.

The Pope's intervention is the latest indication of deep international concern over the sudden repressive turn taken by the Cuban regime. Some of the most severe criticism has come from governments and individual intellectuals who had previously sympathised with Mr Castro in his never-ending confrontations with the United States.

"Must they learn the bad habits of the enemy they are fighting?" the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano wrote last week. He had previously praised Mr Castro as a "symbol of national dignity".

The Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago wrote that Mr Castro, once his personal friend, "has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams".

Two countries, Canada and Italy, have sent formal protests, while Sweden, speaking on behalf of the European Union, has told Mr Castro that he risks severely compromising his standing with the outside world.

In the US, campaign groups and politicians who previously lobbied to end the long-standing economic embargo and lift travel restrictions on US citizens have largely gone quiet. One pro-détente group, the Cuba Policy Foundation, disbanded last week in protest.

A Democratic Senator, Tom Harkin, went ahead with a planned trip to Havana last week. But he did so specifically to contradict the Cuban argument that its actions were prompted by the excesses of the Bush administration and its controversial envoy to the island James Cason.

Mr Harkin said he had "made it very clear that people on all sides of US policy toward Cuba were united in condemning the arrests and sentences of these 75 people".

The Cuban government appears to have been taken by surprise by the vehemence of the reaction from both its friends and adversaries. Mr Castro himself delivered one of his long, unscheduled addresses on national television on Friday night, denouncing the US for stirring up trouble and insisting – in language unnervingly similar to President Bush's announcement of a "war on terrorism" – that he had to "pull the evil out by its roots".

"The arrest of various dozens of mercenaries who betrayed their homeland for privileges and money from the United States, and the death penalty for common criminals ... were the result of conspiracy stirred up by the government [of the US] and the terrorist mafia," he said.

Both Mr Castro's speech and a letter from pro-government intellectuals published in yesterday'sGranma, the Communist Party newspaper, exhibited a certain paranoia about the rest of the world ganging up on Cuba.

Earlier this month, Cuba upset several Latin American governments after it accused them of being "lackeys" of the US for supporting a UN human rights mission to the island. Peru and Nicaragua responded by recalling their ambassadors for consultations.