Friday, Aug. 25, 2000. NewsMax.com
Imprisoned for three years for the heinous crime of flying the Cuban flag upside down – an international symbol of distress – Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, 39, came close to being starved to death, according to the human rights group he serves.
Confined for 42 days alone in an unlit Cuban punishment cell, he lost 20 pounds. While in solitary confinement he suffered from a serious gum infection that went untreated and caused three of his molars to fall out, his distraught wife, Else Morejon, told Reuters news agency.
"I'm very worried. His health is poor. He has a bad nutritional state,'' she said after being allowed to visit her husband for the first time in three months.
"His shoes are falling off, he's so thin. ... And he feels his life is at risk,'' Morejon added.
Dr. Biscet, head of the Lawton Foundation, a pro-life human rights group, is charged with "insulting symbols of the fatherland,'' "public disorder'' and "instigation to commit crime.'' He is imprisoned at the notorious "Cuba Si'' prison in Cuba’s Holguin province.
For his so-called crimes, Biscet has been beaten, repeatedly threatened, humiliated, blackmailed, subjected to brutal interrogations and thrown into cells with insane convicts and common criminals, according to the Lawton Foundation.
Listed by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience, Biscet protested against Cuba’s violation of human rights at the prison by acts of civil disobedience, such as by fasting and prayer, and was punished by being locked up in solitary confinement, his wife told Reuters.
Castro’s communist government sees Biscet, and all such dissidents, as "counter-revolutionary'' troublemakers doing the bidding of the U.S. government or anti-Communist Cuban-American groups in Florida. Cuba denies it holds prisoners of conscience, insisting that all inmates are
imprisoned for legitimate crimes under the penal code, according to Reuters.
During a speech that many say sealed his fate, dictator Fidel Castro condemned Biscet as a counter-revolutionary "ringleader'' before his trial, making his conviction certain.
In addition to the flag incident, Biscet's activities before he was jailed included waving anti-abortion placards and trying to organize fasts, marches and open-air meetings to promote civil disobedience. He also was accused of receiving money from a powerful, Miami-based, anti-Castro group, the
Cuban American National Foundation.
According to a statement from the Lawton Foundation, Biscet told "his family that due to the repressive hostile environment he finds himself in, he fears for his life and highly distrusts the medical personnel at the prison facility. In addition Dr. Biscet confirmed that all mail he had
sent from prison had been intercepted because none had reached its destiny, family and friends in Havana.
"For his struggle, Dr. Biscet has been arbitrarily detained 26 times in 18 months, expelled on February 1998 from the Cuban National Health System and, along with his family, evicted from his home, depending on the charity of friends to survive. This Cuban physician has suffered what all
those who oppose this regime face physically and psychologically: beatings, threats, humiliations, blackmails, intimidating interrogatories and arbitrary incarcerations in cells along with insane individuals and common criminals.
"On several occasions, State Security has tried to subject Dr. Biscet to psychiatric examinations and pressures him to leave Cuba, to which this human rights activist has reiterated that he will never abandon his country."
Such is the Cuba to which the humanitarian Clinton administration condemned Elian Gonzalez.
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