Cuban dissidents: Colleagues injured in police crackdown
The dissidents say they want police to free 10 dissidents arrested.
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
Cuban dissidents vowed to protest at a State Security office Tuesday
unless police free 10 government critics detained in a crackdown where
several suffered head wounds, a broken rib and other injuries.
Police also severely beat Angel Moya, a well known former political
prisoner, in a lockup because he would not stop shouting anti-government
slogans, according to the dissidents. There was no word on his condition.
Dissident Danis Lopez de Moya said that as of Monday police had freed 38
of the 48 government critics arrested Friday in an unusually harsh
crackdown as they tried to start a protest march from his house in the
eastern town of Palma Soriano.
Police likely were holding the rest until the physical signs of the
beatings they received has lessened or disappeared, Wildo Izaguirre, one
of the 38 freed, told El Nuevo Herald by phone from Palma Soriano.
Lopez de Moya, who was himself arrested and released, said many of 38
already had gathered in his house and agreed to march to a State
Security office Tuesday morning unless the other 10 are released.
Izaguirre, Lopez de Moya and Prudencio Villalón, another of the 38
dissidents freed, said the police crackdown Friday was one of the most
violent they had experienced.
"As we left the house in groups of five, police jumped us, beat us and
dragged us to the parked buses," said Izaguirre, who added that police
lined up in a gauntlet pushed him to the ground and kicked him in the face.
Police continued beating the dissidents once inside the government-owned
buses, Izaguirre added, and the driver of one bus also hit several of
the government opponents with a mechanic's wrench.
Eurbis Perales needed nine stitches to close his wounds and Abraham
Cabrera needed five, according to Villalón, who said he spoke with the
pair in a police lockup after they were brought in from the hospital.
Cabrera was bleeding so much on the bus that he smeared some of his
blood on a window, drawing anti-government slogans from some of the
neighbors who were watching the crackdown, Villalón added.
Misael Valdes Diaz was treated for a broken rib and another dissident
suffered a swollen eye, but virtually all were punched or kicked, said
Villalón. He and several of the 20 other dissidents in one of the buses
also vomited when police sprayed them with some type of crowd-control gas.
Police put the 38 detainees into buses that began dropping them off
Saturday and Sunday one-by-one, every half-mile or so, on the road to
Santiago de Cuba, the country's second-largest city.
Still detained were Moya and José Daniel Ferrer García, both former
political prisoners freed this spring as part of a decision by Cuban
Ruler Raúl Castro to release 52 political prisoners.
"I was told they [police] especially vented their anger on Angel and
José Daniel," said Berta Soler, Moya's wife and the leader of the Ladies
in White.
The 52 were the last dissidents still in jail from a harsh crackdown in
2003 that sentenced 75 of them to prison terms of up to 28 years after
one and two-day trials. Most of them — plus another 60 prisoners freed —
agreed to go directly from prisons to the Havana airport and exile in Spain.
Moya, Ferrer and 10 others insisted on remaining in Cuba and continuing
their dissident activities.
As it freed the political prisoners, the Castro government also stepped
up its harassment of dissidents, usually detaining them for brief
periods to avert planned protests such as the Palma Soriano march.
Cuban authorities have carried out 3,327 such "temporal detentions" so
far this year, compared to 2,074 in all of 2010, according to a report
from Havana on Monday by the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and
National Reconciliation.
The march Friday in Palma was to have been part of a rotating series of
street protests starting Thursday in Cuba's easternmost province of
Guantánamo and following later from towns and cities to the west.
The "National March Boitel-Zapata Live!" named after two dissidents who
died during prison hunger strikes, was designed to demand the release of
all political prisoners and an end to human rights abuses.
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