Women make up some of the powerful forces in Cuban dissidence:
A woman, Yoani Sanchez, is Cuba's best known blogger, an independent spirit giving voice to the despair and hopes of the island's "Generation Y."
Women, the Damas de Blanco, lead Cuba's most successful opposition group, marching defiantly each week on behalf of their loved ones imprisoned because of their faith in democracy and liberty.
A woman, Martha Beatriz Roque, herself a former political prisoner, is one of the island's most forceful advocates for change.
Another women's organization, the Rural Federation of Latin American Women (FLAMUR), has been in the vanguard of the campaign to abolish Cuba's apartheid monetary system which helps keep most Cubans in poverty.
And women, like María de los Ángeles Borrego Mir, are held captive in the Castro gulag because they dare to stand up to tyranny.
Borrego — a FLAMUR activist sentenced in December 2005 to 4 years in prison for the supposed crime of being a "pre-criminal social danger" — was the first woman profiled as an Uncommon Sense Political Prisoner of the Week. And while certainly there are other women held in the gulag because of their political and moral opposition to the dictatorship, Borrego is arguably the best known female political prisoner on the island, based on the amount of coverage her case generates in the independent Cuban press.
One of the independent journalists who regularly updates the world on Borrego's plight is Belinda Salas Tapanes, who also is a leading member of FLAMUR. In her latest dispatch, published earlier today, Salas describes how guards at the Western Prison for Women routinely abuse and harass Borrego, despite — and maybe because of — her poor health.
Borrego's husband, Jesus Adolfo Reyes, told Salas that guards have taken his wife's vitamins, pain relievers and other medications, and blocked her from consulting with medical specialists, with no reason given. (According to an earlier report, Borrego suffers from nodules in the throat, stomatitis, acute hip problems, swelling in the feet and high blood pressure.)
"My wife is really sick," said Reyes, "yet they do not offer her adequate medical care. She has not been able to see a specialist who can diagnose the serious problems she presents. They constantly humiliate her to destabilize her emotionally, to brutally torture her."
The gulag does not discriminate against any of its captives. It consumes its victims, who are all sent there on trumped up charges like "pre-criminal social danger." and once it has them in its grips, it tortures them equally. It separates them from their families and if, God forbid, they become ill, it de facto commutes their punishment to a death sentence by denying them adequate medical care.
It makes no difference whether the victims are men and women.
And because of that, María de los Angeles Borrego Mir is no more — nor less — deserving of your solidarity and your prayers.
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