Cuban dissident leader Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, who wrote a book about prison conditions on the island while behind bars, was freed after serving his full 17-year sentence, human-rights groups said.
Garcia Perez, widely known as "Antunez," was released on Sunday, the opposition human-rights group Bitacora Cubana said on Monday.
He was arrested for enemy propaganda and attempted sabotage in 1990. Pope John Paul II petitioned for his early release before his historic visit in 1998. Cuba freed 14 others as a goodwill gesture tied to the pope's visit, but left Garcia Perez in prison.
PRISON JOURNAL
While serving out his sentence he wrote Boitel Lives, a book about prison conditions that was published outside Cuba.
The book is named after Pedro Luis Boitel who died in 1972 in a Cuban prison after 53 days on hunger strike.
The Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation, a which represents anti-Castro exiles, congratulated Garcia Perez for his "consistency of principles."
While Garcia Perez got out, two other dissidents have been imprisoned this month after secret trials, according to a Havana-based rights group.
NEW TRIALS
A lawyer, Rolando Jimenez Posada, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for painting graffiti and distributing pamphlets with an anti-government message.
He was tried over the weekend without a defense attorney or family members present, and convicted of disrespect for authority and revealing state secrets, said Elizardo Sanchez, a spokesman for the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation.
Officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday about these cases.
Sanchez said Jimenez Posada was brought to Havana for the trial from Isla de la Juventud, where he has been jailed since his arrest in early 2003. It was unclear if the time already spent in jail would count toward the 12-year sentence.
According to Sanchez, Jimenez Posada's relatives say his request to represent himself in court was denied and that after he protested, he was not allowed to attend his own trial.
The rights commission also criticized the proceedings against journalist Oscar Sanchez Madan, who wrote about dissident groups and the hardships of island life.
He was arrested April 13 and tried in secret that day, the commission said. Found guilty of "social dangerousness," he was sentenced to four years in jail.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
RSS