Cuban Hunger Striker

[senor_robusto]

also..........

"The Communist Party newspaper Granma, the mouthpiece of the Cuban leadership, weighed in for the first time on Farinas's refusal to take food or water, accusing him of being an agent of US and European interests.
"Cuba, which has demonstrated many times its respect for human life and dignity, will not accept pressure or blackmail," the newspaper said.
Farinas fainted and was taken to hospital on Wednesday, two days after two government doctors and a nurse found him to be very dehydrated during a medical visit.
But the dissident has refused treatment, saying he is ready to die for his cause.
After Zapata's death, international human rights groups called on Cuba to release all political prisoners.
But Granma said: "In this case, it is not medicine that must resolve a problem created with the intent to discredit our political system but the patient himself and the stateless people, foreign diplomats and the media who manipulate him.
"The consequences will be his responsibility, and his alone."
It said Farina had been weakened by successive hunger strikes.
"If he is alive today, it must be said that it is thanks to the skilled medical attention he received despite his status as a mercenary," the official newspaper added.
"A doctor must respect the decision of someone who has begun a hunger strike. This is why we cannot force-feed him, as US authorities do regularly in prisons and in torture sites at Guantanamo (Cuba), Abu Ghraib (Iraq) and Bagram (Afghanistan) in violation of prisoners' rights."
Farina said the Granma article was an attempt to discredit him by claiming that "the one who is going to die is not a pro-democracy revolutionary but a revolutionary who has been tricked and changed under the direction of a foreign power."

that's an interesting point mentioned about force feeding hunger strikers by the US, and also about the medical help he's already recieved, despite being a mercenary!!!! brilliant stuff!!!

as i already said, he should thank his lucky stars che guevara wasn't about to oversee matters, he wouldn't have survived his first attempt never mind the 20 odd that followed!!!

alex

[Soulmanure]

My sense is that if the U.S., which has been hedging towards this for years, opened trade with Cuba, things would shift more or less in the favor of Cuban citizens (the whole cell-phone thing was a tip in that direction, if an ironic one). Obviously, human rights in Cuba are on a par with those in China, though it appears that China's got enough to offer that we'll open our doors.

I think that the Obama administration favors a change here, but things are so f'd up on all fronts, it's low on the priority list. The problem, here at least, has been the atavistic cold-war mentality of many politicians, coupled with the very loud if less and less powerful Cuban-American lobby.

I have a feeling that in a few years Cuba will become a vacation spot for U.S. citizens once again.

[cbob]

I must agree with most of the sentiments expressed here. One hunger striker died in Cuba while I was there, one more is just a hair from death's door and several others are following their leads.
My Cuban friends don't want to talk about it. Curiously, it's normally from "free countries" like the USA, Canada and Ireland/UK that we hear about deaths from protests, perhaps because of the freedom to report the details. It does not seem to change any policies.
Countries with more "repressive" regimes may indeed have many more deaths amoung their prison populations but who is to know? Perhaps Cuba has simply progressed past former policies still common in such countries that send dissidents and "criminals" out behind the jail to be shot in the back of the head. Giant prisons are visible in our own countries to anyone who takes the trouble to look them up and while we have largely given up on shooting prisoners, we don't go to extra-ordinary means to thwart protesters who wish to express an ultimately fatal criticism.