Uncommon Sense

Young Cuban activist: 'I am not afraid to die knowing that I am defending and fighting for my father’s freedom' (UPDATED)

See below for update.

Cuban teenager Enrique Lozada is one of some 60 Cuban activists currently on hunger strike in an attempt to force the Castro dictatorship to release from jail his father, Luis Enrique Lozada Igarza. The elder Lozada has been on hunger strike since he was arrested April 9, and last week announced he was no longer drinking water.

Both father and son were hospitalized suffering the effects of their protest.

On Tuesday, the Patriotic Union of Cuba released a video statement from his son, in Spanish with English subtitles:

Hunger strikes against the Castro regime are dangerous, if only because they rarely sway the regime to act. But at 17, Enrique Lozada has proven himself worthy to carry his father's name.

And to serve as an example to Cubans of all ages of the courage it takes to take on, and eventually defeat, the Castro regime.

For more on the protests, read Pedazos de la Isla blog.

UPDATED, May 1, 2013

Here is a video of what happened when paramedics arrived to provide treatment to the teenager and his mother. (It is worth noting that no one at the house called for the paramedics.)

 

Reporters Without Borders calls for release of Cuban political prisoner Angel Santiesteban

Reporters Without Borders:

Reporters Without Borders calls on the Cuban authorities to quickly release Angel Santiesteban-Prats, a writer and blogger who has been held for the past two months and who has been on hunger strike since his transfer to a different prison at the start of this month. He is now in an isolation cell.

“On 9 April, the same day that the authorities acceded to calls for dissident journalist Calixto Martínez’s release, Santiesteban-Prats was transferred to Prison 1850 in the Havana suburb of San Miguel del Padrón and was subjected to a ‘maximum-severity’ regime of treatment.

“His detention is both cruel and absurd. The authorities are trying to make an example out of him, but they will never be able to prevent the population from expressing itself in diverse ways. We urge them to release him without delay. At the same time, we appeal to him to abandon his hunger strike.

Read the whole thing here.

Rosa Maria Paya, you have the Castro dictatorship's attention

To determine whether the Castro regime was paying attention while Rosa Maria Paya was traveling through Europe and the United States to demand an international investigation of her father's death last year, all she has to do is look out the front door of her Havana home:

 Cuban police harass democracy activists outside Rosa Maria Paya's house earlier this week. (Photo via Facebook from Christian Liberation Movement.)

Or she can log on to the Internet and read the official Castro government blog that warns Paya that she could be prosecuted and jailed for making "false accusations" about her father's death. (We don't link to the official Castro media, but you can read more about the post at the Spain-based Punt de Vista blog.)

Via Facebook, the Christian Liberation Movement, which was founded by Oswaldo Paya, said Rosa and her mother Ofelia Acevedo are thankful for the support and concern in the wake of the threat.

"They know this kind of 'pamphlet' the habitual fear the regime and its accomplices use, but they also remember that this type of warning was always used against Oswaldo Paya," the statement read.

Oswaldo Paya never gave into fear, and I suspect Rosa won't either.

But the anonymous threat is enough evidence to worry about her and her family's safety.

The best thing you can do to protect her is to spread the word about her campaign -- and the Castro dictatorship's effort to silence her.

Rosa Maria Paya and the author, Hialeah, Fla., April 12, 2013. (Photo: Uncommon Sense)

 

Jailed Cuban activist Luis Enrique Lozada increases protest, vows not to drink water

Luis Enrique Lozada and his family.

Jailed Cuban activist Luis Enrique Lozada Igarza, whose arrest and subsequent hunger strike April 9 sparked identical protests by other activists in several Cuban cities, is now vowing to not drink water until he is released, according to Martinoticias.

Lozada, a member of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), was arrested after he and his family, who live in Mafo in Santiago de Cuba province, were subjected to "acts of repudation" by Castroite goons. He was taken to a local police station, where he declared himself on hunger strike, and later was transferred to the notorious Boniato prison.

To demand his release, as many as 53 other UNPACU activists, lead by the group's leader Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, a former prisoner of conscience, joined Lozada's wife and children with their own hunger strikes. The protests have spread to several cities in eastern Cuba.

Lozada's parents were able to visit him in prison on Friday. They reported he was suffering from several bruises he suffered during beatings by police.

"The parents are very alarmed because Luis Enrique Lozado said that from that moment he also wasn't going to drink water," Ferrer said.

Pedazos de la Isla has more coverage of the nationwide hunger strikes, including photographs of the hunger strikers.

Political prisoner tells UN Human Rights Council of abuses in Cuban gulag

Writing from prison, Cuban political prisoner Angel Santiesteban paints for the United Nations Human Rights Council -- of which Cuba is a member -- an horrific picture of conditions in the Castro gulag:

I write to you from the depths of despair produced by being a prisoner of conscience in one of the horrendous prisons of the Castro brothers. In their hands is the opportunity to impose agony upon an extensive penal population that survives the cruelest famine and physical and psychological torture.

To hide the truth, I was taken on April 9 just before international journalists arrived at La Lima prison. They took me out by the back door and I was taken to another prison, 1580, where they have committed all sorts of outrages and humiliations worthy of Nazi concentration camps.

The lack of food and proper sanitation are the other elements that add up to make this a real prison camp. They violate the most basic rights of human beings and their families. Prisoners live crammed together amid continuing violence.

In recent months there have been two large fires of unexplained causes. Multiple suicides are also a daily part of life in prison.

Upon my arrival, after several days of hunger strike and being put in solitary with no light, no water, no clothes or toiletries, I was attacked by several guards, holding me by my limbs while another squeezed my nostrils shut until I opened my mouth to breathe, and then they put stinking soup in my mouth that choked me; and so, over and over, until I was on the floor completely covered in the food helpless to avoid it.

Read the whole thing on Santiesteban's blog.

Cuban activist hospitalized after 'savage beating' by Castro police

Cuban activist Rubilandis Ávila González was hospitalized in serious condition this week after suffering a "savage beating" by police who had arrested him, according to opposition sources.

Avila and another activist, Agustín Ferrer Parra, were arrested Monday in Mella, in Santiago de Cuba province, for demonstrating their support for a mass hunger strike under way by fellow members of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU).

Later, according to Diario de Cuba, Avila was transferred to a hospital with serious injuries to his head.

"A nurse said he wasn't doing well, with numerous injuries to his head, very weak and losing consciousness," said UNPACU spokesman Ramón Bolaños Martín. "Right here we have his blood-stained shirt."

"We ask for international solidarity," Bolaños said. "If he dies, we blame the Castro dictatorship."

Cuban freedom fighter Regis Iglesias remembers his friend Oswaldo Paya

 

 Regis Iglesias and Oswaldo Paya, prior to the "black spring" of 2003.

Regis Igelesias is one of the former Cuban Group of 75 prisoners of conscience arrested during the "black spring" crackdown of 2003 because of his activism alongside other members of the Christian Liberation Movement.

He also is my friend.

Writing from exile, which he was forced to take as a condition of his release in 2010, Iglesias remembers the final days before his arrest. And the last time he saw his friend, mentor and founder of the MCL, Oswaldo Paya, who last summer died in a mysterious car crash:

At 9 am I called tía Beba’s house. I was waiting to hear Efrén answer the phone as usual and update me on the early news of that March 19th day, as we did every day. The day before I had called in the morning and asked him to ask Oswaldo if my presence was necessary in the neighborhood of el Cerro. I wanted to dedicate the afternoon to getting together with the Citizen Committee of the 10 de Octubre district, and check on the march for the signature collection campaign in support for the Varela Project demand. After checking in with Oswaldo, he gave me the green light.

I spent March 18th along with fellow activists until late in the afternoon. Later on, as usual, I visited my friends in the neighborhood and ended the night well after midnight with my dearest friends Luis Torres and Alejandro Rivero. Back home my worried mother waited for me, as news went around of the arrest of a group of activists and independent journalists who were gathered in James Cason’s home, the Principal Officer to the U.S Interest Section in Havana.

So that she wouldn’t worry, I didn’t give it much importance. I told her that as usual, they would let them go after a couple of hours, and that in any case, some of Cason’s guests were notorious informants for the regime’s political police. What was happening had nothing to do with us.

I hadn’t had the chance to look at the official reports because I had been busy at work as manager of the Citizen Committees. Besides, the circles I was frequenting weren’t too fond of listening to the “round tables” or the regime’s news. Therefore, that March 18th I had been unaware of the storm that battered against the peaceful Cuban opposition. In any case, the disinformation of the official television did not give bigger clues as to what was really happening.

I went to sleep and my mother felt more tranquil.

Read the rest below the fold.

Regis Iglesias and the author, April 2013, Miami. (Photo: Uncommon Sense)

Cuban activists continue with mass hunger strike against repression

More than three dozen anti-Castro activists with the Patriotic Union of Cuba, lead by former prisoner of conscience Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, on Tuesday remained on hunger strike to demand the release of Luis Enrique Lozada Igarza and other imprisoned fellow activists.

The Miami Herald reports:

Forty Cuban dissidents remained on a hunger strike Monday to push for the freedom of about 30 jailed members of the most aggressive opposition group on the eastern end of the island, according to their leader.

“Our group is determined to stop these arbitrary arrests,” said Jose Daniel Ferrer, 41, who founded the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) after he emerged from eight years in prison in 2011.

UNPACU quickly became the most active and aggressive dissident movement in eastern Cuba, organizing street marches and protests and filming videos of garbage pickers in the region as well as damage caused by Hurricane Sandy last October that is yet to be repaired.

Ferrer said he and nine other UNPACU members are on a hunger strike in his home in the town of Palmarito de Cauto as well as nine more in the nearby city of Santiago de Cuba, five in the town of Palma Soriano and five more in the city of Holguín. An additional nine are striking in prisons and two more are in Havana and Pinar del Rio.

They have been taking only water since last Tuesday, he added. Nine others who started on the hunger strike dropped out because they had become too weak.

The hunger strike is designed to call attention to the plight of the 30 jailed UNPACU members. Some are being held in police stations and may be freed, but most have been sent to jails, presumably to await trials.

An international, Internet-based campaign has started to organize support for othe protesters. People are being asked to pray and fast at least one day in support of Ferrer and the others.

For details, including an email address to which you can send your pledge, visit http://exilioayuna.org/

You can also join the Facebook group "Convocatoria de Ayuno en Apoyo a Luis Enrique Lozada y su Familia."

On Twitter, spread the word by using the hash tags #freeLuisLozadaIgarza or #huelgadehambreUNPACU

Also, you can find more photos of the protesters here.

Cuban Damas De Blanco finally get to accept Sahkarov human rights prize

Representatives of the Cuban Damas De Blanco, or "Ladies In White," today will finally accept the Sahkarov human rights prize that the European Union awarded the group eight years ago -- but that the Damas had not been able to to accept because of a travel ban enforced by the Castro dictatorship.

Three years ago, I created this video tribute to the Damas, arguably the most successful opposition in group in Cuba to date.

English-language interview with Rosa Maria Paya

On her recent visit to the United States, Rosa Maria Paya should have done more television interviews in English. She is that good.