Orlando Gutierrez-Boronat writes at Capitol Hill Cubans about what is arguably the first family of fight for Cuban freedom, the Siglers:
One courageous family, the Siglers, is at the forefront of the growing civic non violent challenge to the regime. And they have paid a high price for it.
Gloria Amaya was one of the daughters of Matanzas whose spirit would not be broken. She was too small and frail to take up arms, and she wasn't sent to the UMAP's, but she turned the inside of her home into free territory, raising her children on Christian love, democratic principles and anti Communism. Castro had turned Cuba into a Soviet puppet, Gloria taught her children, but the Sigler Amayas would remain a sovereign family.
So it would be that her young sons would lead a new generation of their fellows in the struggle for freedom.
Ariel Sigler, the youngest of her five children, was a tall, strong young man who excelled in sports and became a regional boxing champion. He was expelled from his job as a physical education teacher because he voiced his discontent with the government. On November 16, 1996 he founded the Independent Alternative Option Movement. He led his brothers and scores of other youths into the sugar fields and the countryside, organizing workers to defend their rights against the State as the sole employer, carrying out public peaceful demonstrations, setting up soup kitchens for the poor and hungry supposedly non existent under a "people"s dictatorship," and establishing an independent library in their family home where the books censored by the government could be accessed by the population.
Emboldened by Ariel's leadership and the unshaken support of his family, dozens of Matanceros joined the movement. Eventually Ariel met and collaborated with Havana-based Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner serving a 20-year sentence in a Castro prison for his commitment to freedom.
The regime retaliated ruthlessly against the Siglers. A gang of thugs invaded the family home, hurled Gloria Amaya, now more than 80 years old to the floor, and beat her, breaking her ribs. Police repeatedly arrested the Sigler brothers, earning Ariel the recognition of prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International.
Finally, on March 18, 2003, the Castro dictatorship tried to use the US invasion of Iraq as cover for its attempt to destroy Cuba's civic resistance with one fell swoop. Seventy-five activists were arrested. Ariel and his older brother were sentenced to 20 years each. Weighing 250 pounds at the moment of his arrest, Ariel is now at less than 100 pounds. He lies in a prison hospital suffering from a battery of illnesses he did not have before being imprisoned. His family is convinced that, as has been the case with other Castro opponents in the past, the regime is using a combination of induced illnesses and medical negligence to get rid of one of its most tenacious foes.
Read the whole thing here.
Read more about Ariel Sigler's current condition here, his family here and my profiles of him and his brother Guido, who also is in jail, here.
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