Get to Know a Cuban Freedom Fighter

The other day, WInnie Biscet, daughter of Cuban prisoner of conscience, Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet, emailed me to ask me to post a video of her father's friend, former political prisoner, Raúl Arencibia Fajardo, who is now in the United States. She said people don't know about the peaceful fight he waged in Cuba and hoped that this video would help people to recognize what he has done. He was arrested with Dr. Biscet in 2002 and sentenced to three years in jail and was released due to his fragile health in 2005.

What you may have heard about him while he was in jail is that he is asthmatic, had undergone lung surgery and has emphesyma and was denied his medication while in prison, including an inhaler. When he suffered intense stomach pains in prison, a doctor came and diagnosed him with a kidney infection without examining him. She gave him medicine after he told her what medications he was allergic to, and he then had an allergic reaction because she ordered the nurse to inject him with the very medicine he had told her he could not have. For the first two weeks of his imprisonment he did not have a bed.

Raúl was supposed to be imprisoned in a less-populated jail because of his health but instead he was placed with some one hundred other prisoners. Some of those prisoners were highly dangerous and violent and stole all of the possessions he had with him as well as the medicine his wife brought to him. They also provoked him to try to get him to fight and threatened his life.

You might think that this man did something terribly savage to warrant being deprived of medication and a bed and being put in a part of the prison with violent criminals when he was so sick. No, he was just that dangerous to the castro regime, which knew what it was doing when they arranged this- he would either die from a fatal asthma attack with no medicine to stop it, or he'd be killed by other prisoners. But, actually, his arrest and imprisonment was for the drummed up charges of "comtempt for authority" and "disorderly conduct," and "resisting arrest." He was a dangerous man, you see, because he was a member of the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, Movimiento 24 de Febrero and the Human Rights' Friends Club, and you can bet that was the real reason he was sent to jail.

Posted by Claudia4Libertad at August 22, 2008 09:47 PM