Cuban political prisoner Francisco Chaviano González has been released from prison, after serving more than 13 years of a 15-year sentence handed down in 1994 because of his "relentless work documenting disappearances."
This is wonderful news for Chaviano, who like most political prisoners suffers from a variety of health ailments, but his early release is no indication of softening by the Raulista regime, just a sign that it does not want a political prisoner to die while in prison. Moreover, under Cuban law, Chaviano can be considered to have completed his sentence, a Cuban human rights lawyer said earlier this summer.
(H/T to Blue Crab Boulevard and to Ziva at Babalú)
UPDATED, 3 p.m. EDT, Aug. 11, 2008
Chaviano, who suffers from a lung tumor and heart problems, tells the EFE news agency that he will remain in Cuba and resume his opposition activities.
"I want to have my heart and lung problems treated and operated on in the United States, but on a medical visit only," said Chaviano, who was warned to leave Cuba before he was imprisoned in 1994. "I am not going to leave Cuba."
Chaviano also said he does not think his release does not mean other political prisoners will soon be paroled.
"The disposition of the government is not very good, I see it as plenty bad," Chaviano said. "I think the government has other plans, has no immediate plans to free other people."
(H/T to Penúltimos Días.)
UPDATED, 6:17 a.m. EDT, Aug. 12, 2008
Babalú has more of Chaviano's observations about conditions in Cuba, in and out of prison.
El Nuevo Herald reports:
''I am back from hell,'' Chaviano, 54, told El Nuevo Herald from his home in Jaimanitas, west of Havana. "If Dante had known the Combinado del Este (prison), he would not have needed his imagination to write The Inferno. He simply would have told what he saw there.''''I spent five years stuck in a cell without seeing the sun, two years without receiving visitors and four years without conjugal visits,'' he added. "It was a cruel, merciless treatment that was also extended to my family, my wife and my children.''
Chaviano, a mathematics professor at Havana's Institute of Chemistry, was arrested on May 7, 1994, and sentenced by a military tribunal to 15 years in prison on charges that he ''disclosed secrets concerning the state security'' and falsified documents.
He had been chairman of the Cuban Civil Rights Council, an organization that supported civil liberties and denounced the penetration of State Security agents into the dissident movement. His case had been brought to the attention of the human rights branches of the United Nations and Organization of American States.
Chaviano said prison life had seriously harmed his health, and that he now suffers from a rapidly growing tumor in one of his lungs and a serious heart condition. During the last two years, he was hospitalized several times with serious pulmonary and cardiac problems, he said.
''The damage in my lungs I owe to them (the government). In Cuba, imprisonment kills,'' Chaviano said.
But he added that he will not seek exile abroad and vowed to continue to actively oppose the government from inside the island.
UPDATED, 6:17 a.m. EDT, Aug. 12, 2008
Chaviano says he will seek medical treatment in the United States, but that he would return to Cuba.
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