HAVANA — Just days after Raúl Castro took office as this country’s new president, Cuba’s communist government signed two important international human rights treaties that Fidel Castro had long opposed, another sign the new administration may be willing to set a new course.
It remains to be seen whether the government will live up to the accords and what the signing of the two pacts will mean for political prisoners on the island. The foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, said after a signing ceremony in New York on Thursday that the government still had reservations about some provisions.
Elizardo Sánchez, head of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a nongovernmental group, said the signing was “positive news because the signing of these pacts is an old demand from inside Cuba and from the international community.”
“I hope Cuba honors the letter and spirit of the law of these pacts, but I am not sure it will,” Mr. Sánchez told The Associated Press.
In a statement published here on Friday, Mr. Pérez Roque asserted that the Cuban government had always upheld the rights outlined in the two international agreements, since the moment Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 and then established a one-party totalitarian state.
“This signing formalizes and reaffirms the rights protected by each agreement, which my country has systematically been upholding since the triumph of the revolution,” he said.
One of the pacts, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, guarantees “civil and political freedom,” including the right to self-determination, peaceful assembly, freedom of religion, privacy, freedom to leave a country, and equal protection before the law.
At present, Cuba severely restricts the travel of its citizens, bans any political parties other than the communist party and prohibits independent political meetings.
Mr. Elizardo’s rights group estimates that there are at least 230 political prisoners in Cuba’s network of 200 jails and detention centers. Amnesty International has said there are at least 58 “prisoners of conscience” on the island, making Cuba one of the most repressive governments in the world when it comes to free speech.
The other pact signed Thursday, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, requires countries to ensure the right to work, fair wages, freedom to form and join trade unions, social security, education and the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.
In 2001, Fidel Castro criticized that covenant, saying it “could serve as a weapon and a pretext for imperialism to try to divide and fracture the workers, create artificial unions, and decrease their political and social power and influence.”
Mr. Pérez Roque said Cuba had not dropped its opposition to independent labor unions. He said the country was signing the covenants now because the old United Nations Human Rights Commission had been replaced by a new Human Rights Council in 2006. The new council dropped Cuba last year from the list of countries whose rights records warranted investigation, a move the United States strongly opposed.
The Cuban foreign minister accused the United States of having used the old commission for “brutal pressure and blackmail” against Cuba.
While human rights activists say it is premature to tell whether Raúl Castro will liberate political prisoners, there have been some small signs the new president favors greater freedom of speech.
The younger Castro brother has openly encouraged more debate and criticism in the society. Some free speech advocates took it as a good sign that the government held back in punishing a group of students who sharply questioned the president of the National Assembly recently over the travel ban.
Earlier this month, Cuba released four human rights activists who had been imprisoned during a crackdown in 2003, in which 73 people were arrested, and allowed them to migrate to Spain.
Though human rights advocated welcomed the release of the four prisoners, most said Cuba still has a long way to go before people can speak their minds freely. “The people are bound hand and foot, intimidated,” Mr. Sánchez, the head of the Cuban rights commission, said in an interview this week.