Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas, the Sakharov rights prize winner last year, has been arrested and police are holding him in the central city of Santa Clara, his mother and dissidents said on Wednesday.
“I spoke with him and he told me that he is under arrest in the third police unit in Santa Clara, and then he hung up,” his mother Alicia Hernandez said by telephone from the city located about 240km east of Havana.
Elizardo Sanchez, of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said the psychologist who went on a high-profile hunger strike last year was detained with 15 other opponents of the communist regime.
On Dec. 15, an empty chair draped in a Cuban flag symbolized Havana’s refusal to allow Farinas to pick up his prestigious Sakharov rights prize in Strasbourg.
In a recorded message to the European parliament that gave him the award, left standing on the empty chair, Farinas signed off as “a psychologist, librarian, independent journalist, three-time political prisoner.”
“I accept the prize because I feel I am a tiny part of the rebellious spirit of this people I am proud to belong to,” Farinas said.
The statement, in which the 48-year-old dissident repeatedly slammed the Cuban regime as “totalitarian,” “autocratic” and “savage,” brought the more than 700 members of the parliament to their feet in resounding applause.
“This empty chair demonstrates just how much this award was necessary,” European parliament president Jerzy Buzek said.
However, the former Polish prime minister said there was hope for Cuba in the history of eastern Europe.
“History repeats itself. In my country, everything changed and that is a reason to be optimistic. Our community of democratic nations today send a strong signal to Cuba,” Buzek said.
Farinas, who was unable to travel to the French city that houses the parliament when authorities failed to deliver an exit visa, urged Europeans at the time to fight for the release of Cuba’s political prisoners, help end anti-opposition attacks, and to call for the creation of opposition parties and trade unions.
Farinas was nominated for the prize in October after staging a 135-day hunger strike, his 23rd, following the February death of fellow dissident Orlando Zapata.
He ended the protest when Cuban President Raul Castro authorized the release of 52 political prisoners on the heels of talks with senior Roman Catholic Church clerics in Havana.
According to Sanchez’s commission, even after all the 52 inmates are released, there will still be 115 political prisoners held in Cuba, where censorship is enforced with an iron fist.
The Cuban government, which skirts the issue in its official media outlets, still denies holding any political prisoners — it says they are mercenaries in the pay of the US.
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