With no explanation other than a simple “do not board” notation on the airline’s computer, Nicaragua denied Cuban doctor Alexander Figueredo the right to fly to Managua, denounced this Sunday on his Facebook account his colleague Alexander Pupo Casas, who this week has publicly announced his desire to leave the Island. “Political apartheid against dissidence,” he summed up.
Figueredo “lost his job because of his outspoken stance against the Cuban government and has been systematically harassed,” he said in a post the Free Cuban Medical Guild group. The toilet was accused in April 2021 of “moral damage to the sector” for highlighting the shortcomings of the health system. The regime considered that for this reason it should “be repressed with the severity that the historical moment requires in order not to allow negative precedents to be created within our labor groups.”
Preventing Figueredo from entering Nicaragua is “another Machiavellian move by the dictatorship,” writes the Free Cuban Medical Association and recalls that, after his dismissal, Figueredo was informed that he was not regulatedthe bureaucratic euphemism to say that he could travel abroad “They let him get his passport, buy his plane ticket and on his way from his province (Granma) to Havana they tell him that he cannot travel” because Nicaragua does not authorize his entry and therefore cannot get on the plane.
“This is psychological warfare for Figueredo,” Pupo stressed in a second post. “This serves as evidence that in Cuba and Nicaragua there is a total migratory plot. It is like a filter through which they decide who can and who cannot leave or who should and who should not leave.”
Preventing Figueredo from entering Nicaragua is “another Machiavellian move by the dictatorship,” writes the Free Cuban Medical Association
This complicity between Managua and Havana has become systematic against the opponents. Before Figueredo, journalists Héctor Luis Valdés Cocho and Esteban Rodriguez were prevented from entering, who were pressured by the political police to leave Cuba and remained stranded in the scale of San Salvador by Nicaragua’s decision not to allow them entry. The two Cubans decided to continue on their way north and are already in the US.
Oscar Antonio Casanella, his pregnant wife, and their four-year-old son lived through a similar odyssey. This Cuban biochemist, member of the San Isidro Movement and expelled in 2016 from the National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology (INOR) where he had worked since 2004, revealed in a post than Nicaragua prevented them from entering under the argument that “the covid-19 PCR test was not a PCR but a rapid Sars Cov-2 antigen test”.
Casanella made a second attempt to travel to Nicaragua, “we went back to do PCR tests for covid-19,” said the opponent. “We were rejected for the second time by the Nicaraguan regime, leaving us stranded at the Costa Rican airport in another migratory limbo. We managed to leave the airport with a safe conduct pass and continued our irregular trip to the border.”
After four weeks, Casanella arrived with his family on January 16 in El Paso (Texas) and “we turned ourselves in to the US immigration authorities. We were released on January 18 and arrived at the Miami airport on the 19th.” .
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