In Cuba, it takes courage to work as an independent journalist, and doubly so, if not more, to survive in prison with your ideals and principles intact. The regime's goal for its imprisoned journalists and other political prisoners is not only to confine them, but to break their spirit, their will to resist, to "re-educate" them on the glories of the revolution.
Or maybe it's just to kill them.
In the gulag, as in so many aspects of Cuban life, the regime is a failure, succeeding, with its cruelty, only in strengthening the opposition.
And creating heroes, like Fabio Prieto Llorente.
An independent journalist, Prieto, 43, was arrested during the "black spring" of March-April 2003, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Despite suffering from a variety of health ailments, Prieto has been able to use prison as just another venue for his resistance to the regime.
A story posted at Payo Libre this morning reports that Prieto has been confined for more than 20 days to a punishment cell at the El Guayabo prison on Isle of Pines. His niece, Senia Echevarria Prieto told human rights activist Juan Carlos González Leiva that Prieto was being punished because he had refused to wear a prison uniform reserved for common criminals and had resisted other attempts by guards to humiliate him, according to the story by journalist Luis Esteban Espinosa.
Echevarria said her uncle, who is suffering from a pulmonary ailment and has been coughing up blood, is being forced to sleep on a concrete slab and is not allowed a coat to protect him from the cold. He also is being denied access to the sunlight and to his Bible.
Prieto is no stranger to trouble in prison. For other examples of his resistance — including previous refusals to wear a common prisoner's uniform — read Reporters Without Borders' profile of Prieto.
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