Cuban Student Leader Launches Hunger Strike for Rights

Press Releases

From Cuba

Articles

Human Rights

Media Coverage

» Press Releases

Cuban Student Leader Launches Hunger Strike for Rights
By Cuban Democratic Directorate

Baracoa, Guantánamo Province. July 7, 2008. Cuban Democratic Directorate. Early on Monday morning, former Cuban political prisoner and opposition movement leader declared himself on hunger strike to demand respect for his right to move about freely within his own country. Rodríguez Lobaina was arbitrarily arrested in Havana on July 3, and taken to the city of Baracoa in eastern Cuba. He was again arrested on July 6 on his way to Havana, where he has lived for three years with his wife.

Rodríguez Lobaina is the president of the Cuban Youth Movement for Democracy, an organization of students and young professionals that advocates for academia freedom and university autonomy.

The full text of Rodríguez Lobaina’s statement to the international community follows below.

Statement released by Néstor Rodríguez Lobaina from Baracoa, Cuba.

July 7, 2008.

Speaking to you from my berth of resistance, this is Néstor Rodríguez Lobaina. At this moment, I am lying on a simple couch with the flag and national symbol to notfiy the world, and especially the International Youth Committee for Democracy in Cuba, that I have declared myself on hunger strike in protest of the illegal kidnapping and arbitrary holding, completely outside of the Cuban constitutional legal framework, to which I have been subjected by State Security in Baracoa and in Havana.

I am not being allowed to travel to the capital, where I have been living for three years, legally married to Amalia López Morena, and they have sent me to this internal exile without making any kind of provisions. All my belongings are in the City of Havana. I was arrested with only the clothes on my back on July 3 at about 2 in the afternoon, during the Cuban regimes latest wave of repression against the democratic forces inside Cuba.

I am requesting the solidarity of the pro-democracy student movement, of those brave young people in Venezuela who knew how to defeat the aspiring dictator Hugo Chávez Frías in that referendum with the great victory won by the “No” campaign led by young people and in which they played the leading role. I am also calling on the members of the International Youth Committee for Democracy to issue a statement of solidarity before this unjust and illegal internal exile to which I have been submitted by the political police.

We are also calling on those international organizations that defend human rights, the NGOs that have stood in solidarity with us like the Lech Walesa Foundation, People in Need, and People in Peril in the nations of Eastern Euorope who also had the experience of struggling, as we now struggle against totalitarian tyranny.

We are issuing a call from this berth of resistance to request solidarity for the opposition movement inside Cuba. There are other fellow countrymen who have been victims of this illegal internal exile. We are living under a state of siege in Cuba, a state of emergency decreed by the Cuban authorities without making it public.

We truly regret that the European Union lifted its diplomatic sanctions. The latest actions taken by the Cuban government against the internal opposition are proof that this government will not make the smallest gesture of willingness to begin a process of transition to democracy in Cuba.

The only objective of the Cuban government is to maintain itself in power no matter what the consequences at the cost of spilling the Cuban people’s blood. As it has done on past occasions, the government has threatened to send in the tanks as happened in China in 1989 against the student movement in Tiananmen Square, to whom we recently paid tribute on the streets of Havana despite obstacles placed in our way by the political police.

I would like to add that what is happening to me is illegal. I have declared myself on hunger strike indefinitely in protest of this arbitrary measure, this illegal measure taken by the State Security apparatus in this country. I am requesting the support of the international community that loves freedom and loves democracy.

Send by E-mail | Printable Version

About the author