Cuba driving dissidents off island with threats
Cuba’s state security is pressuring dissidents to go into exile in its attempt to weaken opposition on the communist-run island, according to a new report by a non-governmental human rights organization, The Guardian reports:
The Madrid-based Cuban Prisoners Defenders released a 259-page report that named 35 activists, independent journalists and artists whom authorities had forced to leave the country over the past two years, telling them never to return. State security threatened them with prison or bodily harm if they did not leave and harassed their families, the NGO, which has links to Cuba’s largest opposition group, the Patriotic Union of Cuba (Unpacu), said….Cuban Prisoners Defenders NGO, which formed late last year, said more than a third of the 26 activists who responded to its online survey said they were escorted to the airport by state security and forced into exile.
Cuban dissident Rosa María Payá received the 2019 Morris B. Abram Human Rights Award for her “courageous defense of democracy and human rights.” (Click here for video of her remarks), UN Watch reports:
Payá is the daughter of renowned Cuban dissident and democracy advocate Oswaldo Payá, who was killed in 2012 under mysterious circumstances. Today, Payá carries on the work of her father as the leader of Cuba Decide, a non-partisan group calling for a national referendum on the question of holding free, democratic elections in Cuba. ….She called on UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet to speak out against gross human rights violations perpetrated by the Cuban regime against its own citizens and against people throughout Latin America, including in Venezuela.
“We need to denounce the false legitimacy of a Cuban constitution that seeks to perpetuate the regime and to denounce the false legitimacy of the President and Communist party leader, given that they have been never elected by the people of Cuba in free, fair, and multi-party elections,” she said.
Click here for a TV report in Miami’s Local10.com news.