Cuba’s communist government on Tuesday started relocating political prisoners closer to their families after church-government talks aimed at ending politically embarrassing hunger strikes, dissident and family sources said.
The action came after church-government talks launched on May 19 aimed at ending hunger strikes in support of the political prisoners, which have become a major political embarrassment for Cuban President Raul Castro.
So far, the Cuban government has moved six political prisoners to jails closer to their families on Tuesday, the Archbishop of Havana’s office announced.
The prisoners who have been relocated are Felix Navarro (sentenced to 25 years), Antonio Diaz (20 years), Diosdado Gonzalez (20 years), Ivan Hernandez (25 years), Jose Luis Garcia Paneque (24 years) and Arnaldo Ramos (18 years), the office said.
They all are among the 53 dissidents still jailed after a major 2003 roundup that sent 75 Cubans to jail for opposing the Americas’ only one-party communist regime.
PRIORITY CASES
The government agreed with Catholic Church mediators to move the sickest among the prisoners — as many as 25 according to dissident sources — to hospitals for treatment.
However, there was no relocation of that kind immediately known.
Garcia Paneque is a doctor, 45; Hernandez, a journalist, 39; Ramos, an economist, 68; Navarro, a teacher who is 56; Gonzalez, a farmer, 45; and Diaz, an electrician, 47.
The Ladies in White, an activist group of relatives of political prisoners, welcomed the news it has been waiting years to hear.
“It is a door that is opening, it is the beginning of something that we are waiting for, which is freedom for everyone,” Berta Soler, one of the group’s leaders, said.
Last week a dissident on a three-month hunger strike had said the government would take steps; Guillermo Farinas went on his latest strike demanding that 26 sick political prisoners be freed before he would end the protest, a source of shame for Castro’s government.
Church officials negotiated with the government on behalf of Farinas.
HUNGER STRIKE
An opposition journalist, Farinas began his 23rd hunger strike since 1995 — denying both food and water — the day after leading Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata died on Feb. 23 following an 85-day hunger strike.
Farinas is currently in Santa Clara hospital in central Cuba, where he has been treated with an intravenous drip since March 11.
Farinas’ case no doubt alarmed the government after Zapata’s drew widespread international condemnation.
Dissident groups say there are more than 200 political prisoners held in Cuban jails. Amnesty International considers 65 of them as prisoners of conscience.
Cuba denies it holds any political prisoners and calls dissidents “mercenaries” funded by the US and a conservative Cuban American “mafia.”
The Catholic Church has been pressing Castro’s regime on the issue of political prisoners without, however, resorting to confrontation.
It recently persuaded authorities to drop a ban on a group of wives and female relatives of jailed dissidents known as the Ladies in White holding a public march in the capital calling for their loved ones to be freed.
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