Cuba deports 8 Spaniards for joining demonstration

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba deported eight Spanish women on Monday who took part in a dissident protest for the release of political prisoners, a Spanish diplomat said.

Cuban authorities seized their passports and airline tickets and told them to stay in their hotels after they took part on Sunday in a march by Cuban women demanding the release of their husbands and sons jailed for political reasons.

"They told us they were coming for us later to expel us," the spokeswoman for the group, Barcelona city councilor Francina Vila, told reporters.

Spanish diplomats accompanied the women, members of the Democratic Convergence of Catalonia party, to Havana airport and saw them onto a flight to Madrid.

The deportations occurred on International Human Rights Day as Cuba's communist government announced it would sign two United Nations covenants on political, civil and social rights.

The Catalan women, along with others from Sweden, Bosnia and Peru, had joined a march by a Cuban dissident group known as the "Ladies in White" because they dress in that color and walk in silent protest demanding freedom for their men.

The foreign women, who traveled to Cuba on tourist visas, carried banners that said "democracy" and "freedom."

The Cuban government insists that tourists have no business meddling in Cuba's internal affairs and has in the past deported numerous foreigners who support local dissidents.

Cuba's communist authorities insist there are no political prisoners in the one-party state, and it labels all dissidents as "mercenaries" on the payroll of its arch-enemy, the U.S. government.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque announced on Monday that Cuba will sign the U.N. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and a similar pact on economic and social rights by March 2008. Havana has long refused to sign the pacts, adopted in 1976 at the height of the Cold War.

He said Cuba would open its doors in 2009 to scrutiny by the newly created U.N. Human Rights Council. Cuba refused visits by a special rapporteur appointed by the previous body, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which Havana said was manipulated by the United States.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle and Esteban Israel, editing by Patricia Zengerle)