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.
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
POWER ABUSE WORRY: Some people warned that the broad language of the treaty could lead to overreach by authorities and enable the repression of government critics Countries signed their first UN treaty targeting cybercrime in Hanoi yesterday, despite opposition from an unlikely band of tech companies and rights groups warning of expanded state surveillance. The new global legal framework aims to bolster international cooperation to fight digital crimes, from child pornography to transnational cyberscams and money laundering. More than 60 countries signed the declaration, which means it would go into force once ratified by those states. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the signing as an “important milestone,” and that it was “only the beginning.” “Every day, sophisticated scams destroy families, steal migrants and drain billions of dollars from our economy...
RSS