Cuban dissident rejects offer, continues hunger strike

Posted on Saturday, 11.09.13

Cuban dissident rejects offer, continues hunger strike
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
JTAMAYO@ELNUEVOHERALD.COM

The wife of a Cuban dissident and rapper hospitalized amid a lengthy
hunger strike said Friday that he rejected an offer by a top State
Security official to fully investigate his complaint that he was
unfairly jailed if he first dropped the protest.

Angel Yunier Remón Arzuaga, 30, was fitted with a large-bore port on his
neck Friday at the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Hospital so he can receive
more intravenous liquids, said his wife, Yudisbel Roselló Mojena.

Doctors told her that he remains in critical condition in an intensive
care unit and could fall into a coma because his vital signs are
dropping, the 20-year-old Roselló told El Nuevo Herald by phone from the
hospital in the eastern city of Bayamo.

Remón is coordinator for the dissident Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU) in
the cities of Bayamo and Manzanillo, and goes by the name of El Critico
in the rapping duo Los Hijos que Nadie Quiso – The Sons that No One Wanted.

A State Security lieutenant colonel who arrived from Havana told the
dissident Wednesday that his complaint that he had been unfairly jailed
since March 26, but could not be properly investigated unless he halted
the hunger strike, Roselló said.

Remón told the officer that he would not call off the hunger strike
unless he is freed unconditionally, she added.

He stopped eating solid foods in mid-September, stopped taking liquids
two weeks ago but later resumed, and was taken from prison to the Carlos
Manuel de Cespedes Hospital on Oct. 29, according to reports from fellow
dissidents.

Prosecutors accused Remón of repeatedly kicking State Security Maj.
Julio Cesar Sánchez Fonseca, who led police and a riot squad on a raid
of his home on March 26. They are seeking an eight-year prison sentence.

Roselló said her husband did not attack Sanchez and did not try to
defend himself as the State Security official and others forced him to
the ground and wrested away a camera that Remón was using to film the raid.

Government-organized mobs had staged what are known as "acts of
repudiation" outside his home four days in a row, throwing rocks, chunks
of asphalt and a dead cat at his house, according to UNPACU executive
secretary Jose Daniel Ferrer.

An UNPACU video of the confrontations posted on You Tube shows several
bystanders applauding as Remón used the asphalt to write "Down with the
dictatorship" on huge letters on the street, Ferrer added.

Roselló said her husband had been beaten in prison by guards and
prisoners, had been confined in windowless punishment cells and had come
down with a case of cholera, a serious diarrheic disease making the
rounds of Cuba.

Three imprisoned dissidents have died amid lengthy hunger strikes in the
past three years: Orlando Zapata Tamayo in 2010 and Wilman Villar in
early 2012. Opposition activist Juan Wilfredo Soto died in 2011 after
complaining of a severe police beating.

Source: "Cuban dissident rejects offer, continues hunger strike - Cuba -
MiamiHerald.com" -
http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/11/09/3740488/cuban-dissident-rejects-offer.html#storylink=misearch