Cuban political prisoner Ariel Sigler's health turns for the worse

Ariel Sigler Amaya, before he was imprisoned ...

... Ariel Sigler, after seven years in the Castro gulag

Ariel Sigler Amaya used to be a heavyweight boxer, a championship athlete, a bull of a man.

Today, after more than seven years as a prisoner of the Castro dictatorship, he is gravely ill, an invalid, barely a shell of his former self. Sigler, according to Cuban human rights activist Elizardo Sánchez, may be the only prisoner of conscience in the world confined to a wheelchair.

Sánchez, head of the unofficial Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, warned this week that Sigler, who has been hospitalized for more than a year, had recently become even sicker due to problems with his blood pressure.

“The government is aware that he is very ill and they don’t release him for political reasons,” Sanchez said of Sigler.

Ariel Sigler at his mother's funeral earlier this year.

The dictatorship cares if Sigler lives or dies only to the extent that his fate serves its interests. It would rather be spared the embarrassment of yet another political prisoner dying while in its custody.

But it will release him, if ever, only if it feels the benefits for itself would outweigh any perception that it is giving in to domestic and international pressure.

The key is the volume of that pressure. The dictatorship was placed on the defensive by the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo on Feb. 23, and the ensuing international reaction. In some respects, the worldwide response has been extraordinary, even if it has not forced the dictatorship to bend on the question of political prisoners.

The past two months may have signaled the beginning of the end of the Castro dictatorship, so now — as Guillermo Fariñas said this week in rejecting pleas that he end his hunger strike on behalf of Sigler and other seriously ill prisoners — is not the time to let up on the regime.

Instead, it is time, louder than ever, to demand the release of Ariel Sigler Amaya and all Cuban prisoners of conscience.

Over and over and over again.

Before it is too late.