Show your support for a Cuban human rights hero

Dr. Darsi Ferrer

Dec. 10, one month from today, is International Human Rights Day, which commemorates those fundamental freedoms that unite — or should unite — people around the world. Respect for those human rights is not equally enforced around the world, and while they are repressed at any time, anywhere, we are all less free.

In Cuba, one of the most forceful, most effective spokesmen, for human rights, and how that respect from the Castro regime is absent on the island, has been Dr. Darsi Ferrer.

Ferrer has exposed how the reality of Cuban health care falls far short of the myth, and he has organized marches to demand that the human rights of all Cubans are protected and respected. He has been assaulted by the dictatorship's goons, only to return to the streets again the next year.

This year, however, Ferrer may not be able participate.

Since July 21, he has been in prison. No formal charges have been filed, but apparently he has been accused to buying a couple bags of cement on the Cuban black market to make some repairs to the home he shares with his wife and young son.

No one who knows Ferrer, and knows the Castro dictatorship, believes that.

Ferrer, and his ideals, and his willingness to act on those ideals, make him very dangerous to the regime. After years of trying less severe methods to silence him, a frustrated dictatorship dropped the hammer it holds over all Cubans, and threw him in jail.

If Ferrer is still imprisoned on Dec. 10, he needs you to pick up his banner.

An easy, but powerful way to do that is by participating in a blogburst, in which supporters will use the Internet — whether it's a blog, a Twitter feed, a Facebook status, a comment on a blog — to demand two things:

Human rights for Cuba.

And the release of Darsi Ferrer NOW!

As Ferrer has demonstrated, the slogans can be that simple.

And if we unite to express that message, it can be that powerful.

For more about the planned blogburst, go here.