Antúnez still imprisoned after 17 years
By Diputado Jaime Mario Trobo

Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antunez"

Antunez is a Cuban imprisoned more than seventeen years ago for proclaiming himself against the Castro regime. This past March 15th, was the last day of the time he was sentenced to spend in prison in a trial which will surely soon be revisited when the same thing happens in Cuba that is happening in all of Latin America. Since the dictatorship has run out of the sentences that fell on this political prisoner one after the other, it continues to hold him in prison without any other justification than its authoritarian will.

Antunez, is one of the 300 political prisoners who suffer the permanent violence of a regime which does not allow the International Red Cross visit the country, much less its prisons: These prisons where common prisoners and political prisoners are brutalized. The prisoners are given summary trials lasting no longer than 72 hours once it is proven that they wrote critically of the government, were active in political parties that advocated freedom of expression and elections, formed part of human rights monitoring groups or lent books from their homes by censored authors or containing opinions censored by the government. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one such censored document.

Antúnez is a black Cuban, whose skin color proves a burden in a country where blacks have no place in the highly restricted authoritarian power centers, despite being an extremely large proportion of the population. Antúnez was imprisoned at a very young age, barely 24, and has spent half his life behind bars. Antúnez has never ceased to rebel against the degrading treatment to which he is submitted, which seems only to encourage the cruelty of his jailers. Antúnez has flirted with death on his repeated hunger strikes making demands on behalf of his fellow prisoners up and down Cuba. He has challenged the ignorance of a stuporous international community dosed in the past as now by the Cuban dictatorship’s narcotic, saturating propaganda.

Antúnez is awaiting his freedom since March 15, the last day of his sentence. He surely awaits it in order to offer a demand for his people’s dignity, for that of his fellow prisoners, for his country’s freedom and for tolerance in the Cuban nation from the very gates that once constrained him. Perhaps after his new courageous cry the regime will find reasons to imprison him again, and Antúnez will continue spending most of his life as a prisoner rather than as a free man.

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In Memory of Mario Manuel de la Peña