Cuban opposition figure arrested ahead of banned protest | Politics News

Guillermo Farinas was arrested on Friday, his family said, three days before opposition activists want to hold a protest.

Cuban dissident, journalist and human rights activist Guillermo Farinas was arrested on Friday, his family said.

His arrest on Friday came three days before opposition members were planning a government-banned protest.

“You arrested him today. They took him around 2:10 p.m. [19:10 GMT]“, Farina’s mother Alicia Hernandez told the AFP news agency.

She said her son was taking antibiotics for a urinary tract infection.

“An ambulance and two police patrols came and took him to Arnaldo Milian Castro Hospital,” said Hernandez.

“You told me that a prosecutor will visit him tomorrow to indict him, but we don’t know what for.”

Farinas, 59, is a trained psychologist and has worked as an independent journalist and human rights activist. In 2010 he received the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

In the past 20 years, Farinas has gone on 23 hunger strikes to protest the Cuban government, causing serious health damage.

He is a member of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, the country’s most active political opposition group.

Farinas is arrested ahead of a planned opposition-led demonstration for Monday to demand the release of political prisoners in Cuba.

The gathering was banned by the island’s communist government, but organizers plan to hold it anyway.

Government agencies claim that the organizers of the protests are backed by Washington and are trying to provoke a change of government.

President Miguel Diaz-Canel said his supporters were “ready to defend the revolution” in the face of “an imperial strategy (of the United States) to try to destroy the revolution”.

“We are calm, confident, but attentive and vigilant, and we are also ready to defend the revolution, to face any interventionist action against our country,” said Diaz-Canel on Friday during a television appearance.

“We are a revolution that is open to dialogue and debate,” he added, “but we are a society that is closed to pressure, blackmail and foreign interference.”

Cuban officials who deny the existence of political prisoners in the country consider the opposition to be illegitimate and claim that it is US-funded.

Unprecedented nationwide street protests rocked Cuba in July when people took to the streets shouting “freedom” and “we are hungry”.

One person was killed, dozens injured and 1,175 people arrested in the protests. Half are still in prison, says the human rights group Cubalex.

The main organizer of Monday’s march, Yunior Garcia, said Friday authorities had warned him that he would be arrested if he continued his plans to march alone a day early.

“They even told me which prison they would take me to,” Garcia told AFP, insisting that he would go on his lonely protest walk anyway.

“I’m not going to hide.”

Garcia is a 39-year-old playwright who founded Archipielago, the group that urged Cubans to take to the streets on Monday to protest the government.

He says the goal of walking through downtown Havana on your own is to minimize the risk of violence.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/13/cuban-opposition-figure-arrested-ahead-of-banned-protest