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Havana's People's Provincial Court, sitting in Cuba's Palace of the Revolution government headquarters, began hearing the first of 100 witnesses who would testify in support of the compensation claim that was originally presented last June 1.

The suit demands $181.1 billion in damages for what it says were 3,478 Cubans killed and 2,099 disabled as a result of "sabotage, bombings and other terrorist acts" caused by hostile U.S. government policy toward Cuba since the 1959 Revolution.

The opening proceedings, held in the cavernous audience hall of the Council of Ministers, were solemn but subdued.

Prompted by the judge, veteran members of Cuba's security services, some old and greying, dutifully gave details of what they said was the complicity of the U.S. government and its Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in a series of armed risings in the early 1960s against the new revolutionary government.

"Banditry in Cuba was organized, supplied and financed by the U.S. government through the CIA," testified the first witness, Anibal Velaz, who worked for Cuba's military intelligence between 1959 and 1965.

Even though the incidents being remembered occurred over 30 years ago, most of the witnesses testified without notes, reeling off smoothly from memory names of captured CIA spies and infiltrators and their Cuban "counterrevolutionary" allies, as well as the identities of their Cuban victims.

Lawyers presenting the claim on behalf of the "Cuban people" produced declassified U.S. intelligence documents from the period registering plans by the U.S. security services to destabilize and overthrow President Fidel Castro's government.

The court hearing was expected to last more than a week.

It will cover a litany of accusations of direct and indirect U.S. aggression against the communist-ruled island, ranging from the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to a 1997 bombing campaign against tourist hotels in Cuba which Havana says was masterminded by a U.S.-based Cuban exile group.

The Cuban compensation claim is largely seen as a one-sided political and symbolic gesture as Washington, which does not have formal diplomatic ties with Havana, has not responded.

The presiding Cuban judge noted Monday that despite an official summons, the U.S. government had not come forward to contest the charges and was therefore declared "in default".

However, one U.S. lawyer did attend the trial as an international observer. He was William Schaap of New York, who said he had been invited to attend on behalf of the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers' Guild.

Foreign diplomats said Cuba's billion-dollar claim was probably partly a reply to recent U.S. court decisions seen as hostile by Havana, for example the ruling by a Miami judge that families of four Miami-based pilots shot down by Cuban warplanes in 1996 were entitled to compensation.

But some diplomats said the public pillorying of the U.S. government also seemed intended to whip up sentiment at home against Cuba's "imperialist" arch-enemy and to divert attention away from foreign criticism of a recent government crackdown against political opponents.

No senior Cuban political figures were present at the start of the court hearing, although Vilma Espin, wife of Defense Minister Raul Castro, the brother of president Fidel Castro, was in the audience. Espin heads the Cuban Women's Federation (FMC), one of the group of Cuban civic organizations that nominally presented the compensation suit.

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