The political prisoner Yosvany Rosell García Caso suspended his hunger strike on Thursday after three weeks of fasting. Sentenced to 15 years for his participation in the protests on July 11, 2021, the 34-year-old man ingested a broth that his wife brought him to the Lucía Iñiguez Landín Clinical Surgical Hospital, in the city of Holguín.
“Thank God my husband is recovering with serum,” Mailín Rodríguez Sánchez published on his Facebook account. “He drank broth and is in therapy,” she added, while thanking “the support and concern” her family received during her husband’s hunger strike, who lost weight until he barely reached the age of 55 kilograms.
A welder and blacksmith by profession, García Caso was transferred on May 29 from the prison of El Yayal, Cuba Sí, to the prison ward of the hospital. Initially, he refused to receive hydration fluids and was determined to “continue the strike because he is tired of the fact that they continue to violate his rights and those of the other prisoners” from 11J, Rodríguez then explained to 14ymedio.
Family pressure paid off, something that Rodríguez celebrated: “I hope he recovers very soon, his life is worth gold for his children and for me”
The wife hoped that their eldest daughter, 14, would be able to convince her father to eat again. “My daughter is asking me that she wants to see her father and we are making arrangements so that she can visit him in the hospital.” Family pressure paid off, something that Rodríguez celebrated: “I hope he recovers very soon, his life is worth gold for his children and for me.”
García Caso began the strike on May 11, after an incident in which the prison authorities denied him a visit from his wife and three children, and as the days went by he extended his demands to be released as soon as possible.
Upon learning of the strike, the wife went to the prison four times, but was not allowed to see him, and was only able to meet her husband the day after he was transferred to the hospital. The prisoner was also denied religious assistance that Rodríguez repeatedly requested.
This was the third time that García Caso had carried out a hunger strike. In February 2022, he spent 17 days without eating food to demand not to be transferred from Holguín to a prison in Cienfuegos and to demand improvements in prison conditions. At that time, he had been the victim of several suspensions of his right to make regulatory telephone calls and was kept in isolation.
A few months later, in July of last year, he went on hunger strike again after being beaten for dressing in white to commemorate the popular demonstrations of 11J.
The political prisoner assures that he does not regret having taken to the streets on that day of popular protests, an act that cost him to be prosecuted for the crime of sedition. “How could I regret wanting to see my country free from a communist dictatorship, which has submerged us for more than 60 years in extreme misery, and violating all our human rights?” he said in a letter that his wife shared on social networks. . “That blessed July 11 not only marked a before and after the beginning of the end of communism in Cuba, it also showed us the worst face of the dictatorship.”
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