It is not exactly a “new” tactic; the Castro dictatorship has been dumping detained dissidents on remote roadsides and other towns far from their homes without phones or money knowing it would take them days to make it back. Nevertheless, the use of this vile tactic is definitely increasing.
Juan Tamayo in The Miami Herald:
Latest Cuban police tactic: Freeing detained dissidents in remote areas far from their homes
Cuban dissident Ana Celia Rodríguez Torres says police arrested her, punched her and kept her all day in a scorching hot bus, then freed her the next morning in a remote farming area 20 miles from her home.
Another dissident in the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba reports similar treatment. Yasnay Ferrer Santos says she was yanked violently out of a car, held in a patrol car all day and all night and then freed on a rural road 10 miles from her home.
Dissidents and human rights leaders say those incidents are part of a recent shift in tactics that Cuban security forces are using against domestic opponents. Increasingly, they are resorting to physical force and dumping dissidents in isolated areas to harass and intimidate them, say human rights leaders.
“It’s been happening dozens of time, too many times to count, hundreds just with UNPACU” members, said José Daniel Ferrer, head of the opposition Patriotic Union of Cuba. Its Spanish-language acronym is UNPACU.
Ferrer and Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation in Havana, say the shift began in May.
On May 1, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in Switzerland issued a report criticizing the Cuban government’s record — specifically expressing concern over a spike in the number of short-term detentions of dissidents.
Such detentions, usually in police stations, soared from 2,074 in 2010 to 6,602 last year. The rise was perceived as the result of an effort by Cuba’s leader, Raúl Castro, to move away from the notoriously long prison sentences common under his brother Fidel Castro while keeping up the pressure on dissidents.
Continue reading HERE.