European leaders urged to question Diaz-Canel about prisoners of conscience and crimes
Miami, June 21 (EFE).- The Center for a Free Cuba (CFC) on Wednesday urged European leaders to ask Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel about the “murdered” opposition figure Oswaldo Payá and when he will release the “more than a thousand prisoners of conscience” currently incarcerated on the island.
CFC made this request at a time when Díaz-Canel is in Europe on an official visit where he has met with Pope Francis and is expected to hold a meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in addition to participating in Paris at the Summit for a new World Financial Pact and traveling to Serbia.
“Mr. Diaz-Canel has blood on his hands, and represents a regime that assassinated the Christian Liberation Movement’s founder Oswaldo Payá and (…) and gave the order to crackdown on nonviolent protests in July 2021 causing the deaths of Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, and Christian Díaz,” said John Suarez, executive director, of the Washington-based CFC, in a statement today.
Regarding the meetings that he will hold with the leaders of these countries, Suárez said that he hopes that the Western leaders and the media that cover these meetings will ask the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba “when he will release” the prisoners. of conscience.
“Currently there are more than 1,250 political prisoners in Cuba, and 39 of them, according to Havana, are minors. They are kept in conditions that reach the level of torture,” he stressed.
CFC referred to the news of the meeting between Pope Francis and Díaz-Canel in Vatican City, news that, however, “does not mention the revelation of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that Oswaldo Payá, a Catholic practitioner, Sakharov laureate and nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 and 2011, was assassinated by Cuban government agents on July 22, 2012.”
State of Cuba is responsible for the deaths of the opposition leader and activist Harold Cepero, which occurred as a result of a car accident caused by a vehicle in which Cuban agents were traveling.
The IACHR also concluded that the Cuban State violated the fundamental rights of Spanish politician Ángel Carromero, who was behind the wheel of the car in which Payá and Cepero were traveling and was held responsible for the accident and sentenced to four years in prison in Cuba. For this independent organization dedicated to promoting human rights and the transition to democracy in Cuba,
Díaz-Canel is “committed to continue on the same path as his predecessors, Fidel and Raúl Castro.” “When Cubans across the island demanded an end to the dictatorship on July 11, 2021,” the regime responded with a violent crackdown that jailed hundreds and killed an unknown number of Cubans, according to the CFC. EFE emi/ar/rrt
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