The hearings opened Monday morning at the Palace of the Revolution -- the seat of Cuba's communist government -- rather than in a regular courtroom, demonstrating the political importance that President Fidel Castro is placing on the legal process.
The hearings will show ``the sick hostility signified by U.S. policy toward Cuba,'' the Communist Party workers' daily Trabajadores predicted Monday in a front-page story.
While the Cuban government is using the hearings to make a political point, it appeared unlikely the lawsuit would result in any damages being paid. There are no American funds in Cuba that can be frozen and seized.
No U.S. representative attended the court proceedings. And the U.S. government did not respond to the claim within 20 working days as required by Cuban law, said Juan Mendoza, one of Cuba's attorneys in the case.
The legal team hopes to show how U.S. policies have damaged Cuban society over the past 40 years, Mendoza said.
More than 100 people are expected to testify before the hearings finish July 22. Huge piles of written evidence also are expected to be presented.
The first witness before the five-member tribunal was Anibal Velaz Suarez, the retired former head of State Security for central Cuba during the early 1960s. He testified about ``the barbaric bloody acts that the CIA committed with the bandits'' in the years after Castro's 1959 rise to power, including killings of members of the new revolutionary government.
The lawsuit, filed in late May in Havana, asks for $181 billion in compensatory and punitive damages for the deaths of 3,478 Cubans and permanent physical damage to 2,099 more people in a variety of acts ranging from the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 to the bombing of Havana hotels in 1997.
The plaintiffs include the National Association of Small Farmers, the Federation of Cuban Women, the Communist Workers of Cuba and the Federation of University Students -- all mass organizations associated with Cuba's communist government.
Cuba's lawsuit appears to be Havana's answer to another lawsuit in the United States. In that case, a federal judge in Miami has ordered Cuba to pay $187 million to the families of three Americans killed in 1996 when Cuban military jets shot down two small private planes off the island's coast.
The three men, members of the Miami Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue, were among four shot from the sky by Cuban MiGs while on a mission searching for Cuban rafters.
Members of the exile group have said the pilots were always in international territory, but the Cuban government has insisted that they invaded Cuban airspace.
Cuban authorities remain infuriated by the American lawsuit, as well as attempts to seize Cuban funds from telephone companies operating long distance phone service between the two countries.
Cuba would need strong international backing in any attempt to force U.S. payment, perhaps from an international court.
New York attorney William H. Schaap, attending the hearings as a legal observer for the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild, said the case raises significant issues -- comparable to issues he said are raised by U.S. military attacks in Yugoslavia and Panama.
``I think it is a legitimate complaint under international law,'' he said. ``But the sad thing is that international law is no longer respected.''
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press