The Assembly of the Cuban Resistance (ARC), which includes 35 civil organizations from inside and outside Cuba, expressed this Thursday its solidarity with the more than 200 political prisoners released in Nicaragua, who were expelled today from the Central American country.
“The recently released Nicaraguan political prisoners, as well as those who are still imprisoned, have the understanding and support of their Cuban brothers who have been so closely and identified with them before, during and now after their unjust imprisonment,” he said in a statement from the ARC.
However, the Cuban exiles stressed that “the price of being free in exchange for exile was never the objective of those patriots.”
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It is an expulsion and exile that responds to the decision of “dictator Daniel Ortega (president of Nicaragua) and constitutes an old and worn strategy of this type of dictatorship to negotiate and obtain concessions”, as well as to “whiten their image before the world,” he said.
The auxiliary bishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Managua, Silvio José Báez, based in Miami, was happy today for the release of these political prisoners but considered that their exile to the US is a “crime.”
“By banishing them, the Nicaraguan dictatorship commits another crime, showing that they are the ones who do not deserve to be Nicaraguans,” Báez wrote in an apparent allusion to the information indicating that those released will be deprived of Nicaraguan nationality through a legal change.
Among the political prisoners expelled from the Central American country is Cristiana Chamorro, the Nicaraguan presidential candidate most likely to defeat Ortega in the November 2021 elections.
The list of those expelled includes the other six opposition leaders who tried to challenge Ortega at the polls: Arturo Cruz, Félix Maradiaga, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, Miguel Mora, Medardo Mairena and Noel Vidaurre.
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The list, which includes businessmen, human rights defenders, Sandinista dissidents, journalists and independent professionals, was released by the Managua Court of Appeals, after reading a resolution ordering deportation to the United States “for traitors to the country.” 222 opponents who were in prison.
According to press reports, the two who said “no” to leaving the country are the Bishop of Matagalpa, Rolando Álvarez, and the historian and former Sandinista guerrilla Dora María Téllez.
The United States and various countries and international organizations had been requesting Nicaragua for the release of political prisoners for months, who began to be detained with the wave of demonstrations that shook the country in 2018 with requests for Ortega to resign and ended with hundreds of deaths, prisoners and missing. EFE
