Four more prisoner releases announced

With the announcement below, Cuba’s Catholic church announced yesterday that four more prisoners “have accepted the proposal to leave prison and move to Spain.” AFP reports that according to human rights monitor Elizardo Sanchez, the four are hijackers rather than political prisoners, and that two prisoners who are rejecting the offer to go to Spain have begun a hunger strike.

ARZOBISPADO DE LA HABANA

NOTA DE PRENSA

En continuidad con el proceso de liberación de prisioneros, se informa que otros cuatro (4) serán excarcelados próximamente. Ellos son:

1- VÍCTOR JESÚS HECHAVARRÍA CRUZ

2- OSMEL ARÉVALOS NÚÑEZ

3- ALEXIS BORGES SILVA

4- RODRIGO GELACIO SANTOS VELÁZQUEZ

De esta forma suman sesenta (60) los prisioneros que han aceptado la propuesta de salir de la prisión y trasladarse a España.

Orlando Márquez Hidalgo

La Habana, 2 de febrero de 2011

The Egypt story in Cuban media (Updated)

Yoani Sanchez continues to ask for information on events in Egypt that she can spread to others in Cuba. Meanwhile there’s today’s Juventud Rebelde, which today ran the following headline and sub-headline:

Egypt semi-paralyzed by protests

Thousands congregated for the seventh consecutive day in Tahrir Plaza in the center of Cairo. They affirm that they will continue demonstrating until they achieve the ultimate goal of forcing the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.

Update Feb. 2: In today’s Granma: another report on the street protests and a Fidel Castro commentary saying it’s all over for Mubarak.

Marti on travel

Penultimos Dias ran a rich Jose Marti quote last Friday wherein the apostol explained (in 1887) why he most decidedly would not travel to Cuba.

The dozens of readers’ comments that follow are a tutorial on Cuban expatriates’ views about traveling to Cuba today.

Marti would not go to witness the depredations of Spanish colonial rule, he said: “For what purpose would we go there when it is not possible to live decorously, nor does the hour seem to have arrived to return in order to die?” To travel would be painful and shameful, he said. His conclusion: “Others can: We cannot!”

Quotable

A commenter made reference to this quote some time ago and I just came across the actual passage in the book:

“There came a time here when there were 300 counterrevolutionary organizations. Every time that five or six would meet, they would make an organization. They believed that with the United States behind them, animated by the United States, inspired by the United States, stimulated by the United States, supported by the United States against the Revolution, this [revolution] could not sustain itself. And there were also all kinds of opportunists in those organizations…I speak of 300 organizations, and we knew more than they did about what they were doing, because precisely because our organs of security did not torture, they developed as very efficient institutions, and they sought other ways to know what the enemy was doing, to know him, to penetrate him. There was a time, almost at the end, when our people, the revolutionaries, were heads of almost all these counterrevolutionary organizations, because they did a truly beautiful job, perfect, fighting to obtain information, that did not involve physical violence against people. And if a counterrevolutionary in January of 1961 had done a number of things, we knew what he had done every day of the month, and where and with whom he had met, we had all that information. And if they arrested him in 1962, when he had become a dangerous element, he probably did not remember precisely what he had done on that day in the month of January or with whom he had met. But all of that was in the files.”

– Fidel Castro interviewed by Frei Bretto in Fidel y la Religion, 1985

Odds and ends

• Sentences were handed down for 13 defendants in the case of the patient deaths at the Mazorra psychiatric hospital, Granma reports. The hospital director got 15 years. AFP story here; more details at Cuban Colada and El Pais.

• AP: Former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya says he wasn’t really doing Washington’s bidding in the 2009 negotiations over an OAS resolution on Cuba. This Wikileaks cable made it sound that way.

• EFE: Cuba’s foreign minister says that contrary to rumor, former Haitian President Bertrand Aristide is not in Cuba.