A frail, paraplegic political prisoner freed after landmark talks between the Catholic Church and Cuban President Raul Castro vowed on Saturday to push hard to win “freedom and democracy” for Cuba.
Ariel Sigler Amaya, 46, had been in prison for more than six years. He was part of a group of 73 political dissidents picked up in a broad crackdown by the communist government in March 2003.
“The story does not end here. We are going to press on in the struggle, until the last political prisoner has been freed, until we achieve freedom and democracy for the Cuban people,” Sigler Amaya, seated in a wheelchair he began using two years ago, told reporters.
Sigler Amaya, who heads the Independent Alternative Option Movement — an outlawed political group in the western province of Matanzas — has faced a series of chronic illnesses and has been in a wheelchair since September 2008.
Surrounded by elated relatives, Sigler Amaya said he was released thanks to pressure from the international community and not the will of the Americas’ only one-party communist regime.
“Emotionally, I have mixed feelings, both joy and pain, because there are so many [dissident] brothers still jailed,” said Sigler, who maintains that he lost half his body weight in jail due to malnutrition and now weighs 48kg.
Cuban authorities told Cardinal Jaime Ortega on Friday that Sigler, sentenced to 20 years in prison, would be allowed to leave prison.
Six other dissidents will also be moved to jails in their home provinces on Saturday to be closer to their relatives as a result of the talks, the archbishop’s office said in a statement.
Sigler and the other six prisoners were among 53 of the original 73 activists picked up in 2003 still behind bars.
Cuba’s government early this month started moving political prisoners closer to their families after talks with church representatives, according to dissident and family sources.
The talks between Castro and Ortega, launched on May 19, were aimed at ending hunger strikes in support of the political prisoners, which have become a major political embarrassment for the Cuban government.
The Cuban Human Rights and National Reconciliation Commission — an outlawed but tolerated group — says there are some 200 political prisoners on the island. Cuban authorities consider them a threat to national security and claim the prisoners are “mercenaries” on Washington’s pay, out to smear the Cuban government.
The last political prisoner released by the Cuban government was Nelson Aguiar, 64, who was freed for health reasons in October last year after the Spanish government lobbied for his release.
The Cuban government’s move comes just as the EU readies to take action on its policy on Cuba’s human rights situation.
Diplomats in Brussels said Friday that EU foreign ministers will agree today to prolong Europe’s insistence that Cuba make progress on human rights and democracy before ties are normalized.
“There is no unanimity” within the 27 EU nations to alter the current position of no sanctions but no normalization with Cuba, a source in Brussels said ahead of the ministerial meeting in Luxembourg today.
While Spain, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, has called for full relations with the island to be restored, other countries are resisting.
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