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Editorial: Don't forget
plight of Cuban dissidents
San
Antonio Express-News.
April 5, 2004.
Express-News readers will perhaps recognize
the name Claudia Márquez Linares,
a freelance journalist in Cuba who has written
occasional columns about the plight of her
husband, one of 75 dissidents imprisoned
by the Fidel Castro regime last year.
She has not written lately because her
husband's situation is so dire and hers
is so dangerous. Her husband, Osvaldo Alfonso
Valdes, the president of the Cuban Liberal
Party, is serving an 18-year sentence.
Alfonso and his fellow dissidents - poets,
journalists, human rights advocates and
members of outlawed opposition parties -
fell victim to Castro's fear that Washington,
in the wake of the Iraq invasion, was coming
after him next. The dissidents were convicted
in one-day trials and sentenced to six to
28 years.
Human rights groups and some prisoners'
families are reporting that the dissidents
have been denied medical care and forced
to eat bad food and that they live in unhealthy
conditions. In some cases, according to
reports, they have been beaten. Some have
attempted suicide.
"It's a lie," Cuba's foreign
minister, Felipe Perez Roque, declared in
Geneva recently. According to the Associated
Press, Perez Roque said "the 75 mercenaries
imprisoned in Cuba are treated with respect."
It's outrageous that the dissidents are
in jail in the first place. Treating them
with respect would mean releasing them immediately.
That's not likely to happen unless releasing
the prisoners would somehow play to the
perceived benefit of Castro.
Meanwhile, the only recourse is to maintain
international attention - and condemnation
- on the Cuban outrage. The U.N. Human Rights
Commission is meeting in Geneva for the
next several weeks; a resolution targeting
Cuba's dismal rights record is expected
before the session ends.
Márquez herself was briefly detained
and interrogated by Cuban authorities last
fall after she revived the independent magazine
De Cuba (From Cuba).
"Do you love your son?" an agent
asked her. She and Alfonso are the parents
of a 7-year-old.
They do love their son, of course. They
also love their country, caught for now
in the grip of an old and paranoid dictator.
His victims must not be forgotten.
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