Whether Fidel Castro is dead or only partially dead, the last six months have shown that the dictatorship he created is fully capable carrying on his repressive ways.
Consider the following stories culled from this morning's headlines:
Journalist Tania Maceda Guerra reports that officials are denying political prisoner Eduardo Díaz Fleitas the medical attention he needs for a variety of ailments, including gastritis, hypertension, a hernia, ulcers and dermatitis. Fellow political prisoner Nelson Molinet Espino told Maceda that jailers do not give him the food prescribed by prison doctors. They also have blocked Díaz's family from delivering food to the prisoner.
Both Díaz and Molinet are former Uncommon Sense Political Prisoners of the Week. Both arrested during the "black spring" of 2003, the prisoners are serving their sentences — 20 years for Molinet, 21 years for Díaz — at the Kilo 5 1/2 prison in Piñar del Rio.
Also previously mentioned here, several times, is Cuban dissident Dr. Darsi Ferrer.
On Sunday, Ferrer was again the victim of a government-sponsored "act of repudiation," as a group of people gathered outside his house in Havana to shout slogans and to block anyone from entering or leaving the residence, according to a story by journalist Juan Carlos Linares Balmaseda posted at Misceláneas de Cuba.
It is a familiar nuisance tactic, the police using a dissident's neighbors to do its dirty work.
During the demonstration, Ferrer invited two of the group's organizers inside his home for a discussion that lasted about an hour.
"They went away convinced that what they were doing was an abuse," Ferrer told Linares. "They acknowledged that they had been sent by State Security."
Linares' story also describes a similar "act of repudiation" that same morning at the home of journalist Carlos Ríos, who was recently profiled by the New Times newspaper in Miami.
Yancy Ruiz, a member of the Cuban Liberal Party in Santa Clara, on Jan. 23 was sentenced to one year in jail for supposed crime of “social dangerousness," which Amnesty International describes as "a pre-emptive measure that is defined as the 'proclivity to commit a crime' and targets any behaviour contrary to the 'socialist morale' like 'drunkenness,' 'drug addiction' and 'anti-social behaviour' but it is applied to political dissidents, independent journalists and critics."
"His only crime is to think differently than the government," Liberal Party member Yunieski García López told journalist Yoel Espinosa Medrano for a story posted at Cuba Libre Digital.
In protest, other Liberal Party activists distributed to the copies of El Nuevo Herald, which is published in Miami, and other censored writings, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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