Cuban dissident leader Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, who wrote a book about prison conditions on the island while behind bars, was freed after serving his full 17-year sentence, human-rights groups said.
Garcia Perez, widely known as "Antunez," was released on Sunday, the opposition human-rights group Bitacora Cubana said on Monday.
He was arrested for enemy propaganda and attempted sabotage in 1990. Pope John Paul II petitioned for his early release before his historic visit in 1998. Cuba freed 14 others as a goodwill gesture tied to the pope's visit, but left Garcia Perez in prison.
PRISON JOURNAL
While serving out his sentence he wrote Boitel Lives, a book about prison conditions that was published outside Cuba.
The book is named after Pedro Luis Boitel who died in 1972 in a Cuban prison after 53 days on hunger strike.
The Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation, a which represents anti-Castro exiles, congratulated Garcia Perez for his "consistency of principles."
While Garcia Perez got out, two other dissidents have been imprisoned this month after secret trials, according to a Havana-based rights group.
NEW TRIALS
A lawyer, Rolando Jimenez Posada, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for painting graffiti and distributing pamphlets with an anti-government message.
He was tried over the weekend without a defense attorney or family members present, and convicted of disrespect for authority and revealing state secrets, said Elizardo Sanchez, a spokesman for the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation.
Officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday about these cases.
Sanchez said Jimenez Posada was brought to Havana for the trial from Isla de la Juventud, where he has been jailed since his arrest in early 2003. It was unclear if the time already spent in jail would count toward the 12-year sentence.
According to Sanchez, Jimenez Posada's relatives say his request to represent himself in court was denied and that after he protested, he was not allowed to attend his own trial.
The rights commission also criticized the proceedings against journalist Oscar Sanchez Madan, who wrote about dissident groups and the hardships of island life.
He was arrested April 13 and tried in secret that day, the commission said. Found guilty of "social dangerousness," he was sentenced to four years in jail.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS