BY TIM JOHNSON

 WASHINGTON -- Cuban authorities recently held a U.S. citizen in jail for 31 days, denying him access to U.S. consular help, and the State Department said Thursday it is ``raising the issue'' with Havana.

 Ron Douglas Shelton, 41, said that during his confinement he was forcibly sedated and refused use of a telephone, before Cuban authorities put him on a plane to Mexico June 25.

 Interrogations included one session that was ``graphic and violent and screaming,'' he said. ``They were just accusing me again and again of being in the CIA.''

 Shelton has become widely known in Cuba since the early 1990s, even appearing on local radio to publicize shipments of donated medicine he escorted from the United States to Cuba. Shelton said he has delivered some 30 tons of medical supplies to Cuba.

 His sympathies for the Cuban revolution, he said, diminished with his arrest on May 24 as he prepared to board a plane at the Havana airport. No explanation was given as he was taken to a jail in the Miramar section of Havana, he said.

 For a week, Shelton said, he was kept in solitary confinement and given phenobarbital, a sedative widely used in treating epileptic seizures. When Shelton asked if U.S. diplomats had been notified of his arrest, he said, the prison authorities mocked him.

 ``They would say, `We called the U.S. Embassy but we can't help it if they won't come talk to you,' '' he said.

 To his surprise, Shelton said Cuban authorities knew that he was adopted shortly after his birth in Cuba and taken in by a family in the Florida Keys, where he grew up. They treated him as if he were a Cuban national, he said.

 A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs of the State Department said Havana treats virtually all Cuban Americans as if they are solely Cuban citizens. She said Washington has sent Havana a query about the treatment of Shelton.

 ``We are raising the issue with the Cuban authorities,'' she said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ``We've had a lot of problems with getting access to Cuban
 Americans, dual nationals. If Cubans consider someone a citizen, they don't recognize any other citizenship.''

 Shelton, who lives in Germany denied that he was working for the U.S. government at the time of his arrest.

                                    © 2001