Cuban dissident held for third time
Cuba has arrested high-profile dissident Guillermo Farinas, the 2010 Sakharov rights prize winner, for the third time in 48 hours, his mother told AFP.
The Cuban authorities, just hours after releasing him on Friday, arrested Farinas again along with “more than 20” other activists who had gone to lay flowers at a monument to national hero Jose Marti, his 75-year-old mother Alicia Hernandez said.
The high-profile dissident was detained late on Thursday with around 10 other political activists, hours after being released from his initial detention on Wednesday afternoon.
Upon his release earlier on Friday, Farinas was said to be “tired, but well,” Hernandez told AFP by telephone from the central city of Santa Clara, 280 km east of Havana, where she lives with her son.
The 49-year-old dissident said police did not mistreat him.
Cuban authorities “wanted us to sign a statement recognising that we presented a ‘potentially criminal danger to society,’ but we didn’t do it. After three of these statements, they can take you to trial,” Farinas said after leaving jail for a few hours on Thursday.
Farinas went on a 135-day hunger strike last year to draw attention to the challenges faced by dissidents of the Americas’ only one-party communist regime.
His detention came as the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation said it expected human rights to “deteriorate” this year in Cuba. The group said 2010 was “very adverse” despite the release of political prisoners.
