The United States has decried the arrests of the four dissidents for, it says, simply complaining of Cuba's one-party rule. The Cuban Response Cuban officials fire back that critics of its human rights record, including the European Union and the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, are lackeys of the United States. Torture in Cuba has been written about from the decades before Fidel Castro staged his revolution in 1959 and, by most accounts, did away with many of the deep disparities between rich and poor. Poverty has forced many Cubans into prostitution, others into a hardscrabble existence on just a few dollars a week. Elian's father and other Cuban relatives can now travel to the United States, a privilege denied many who live under Castro's regime.
Dissidents say that in the past year, the crackdown on dissent has become especially intense.
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