The Guatao prison has decided to allow the relatives of the sisters María Cristina and Angélica Garrido to bring them food, which means the end of their hunger strike, where they are serving a sentence for demonstrating on 11J. The information was broadcast by Radio Martí, who was able to speak with Angélica’s husband, Luis Rodríguez Pérez, who confirmed that both are still determined not to wear the prison outfit or consume the food provided by the prison.
“They let me see her. She is very weak. She can barely stand for five days of starvation. I brought her a soup and she ate it, but she says that she will not accept any kind of food from the prison, only what they give her.” take your family. Really, what she was doing was not a hunger strike, she is planted, that is: she refused food from the prison, no mattress, no common prisoner uniform, not living in detachments with inmates who committed crimes,” said Rodríguez Pérez .
The activist indicated that the prison agreed to take food to his wife. “The same thing they did with María Cristina, they sent their daughter to see her. She is in the National Hospital, it seems that to separate them. She has no condition other than weakness. She also took a little broth that her daughter brought her. In the case of Lisandra Góngora, I don’t know,” he added.
Rodríguez Pérez also made reference to Lisandra Góngora, who started the strike together with his wife and sister-in-law, but who he does not know if he continues to carry it out.
“The same thing they did with María Cristina, they sent the daughter to see her. She is in the National Hospital, it seems that to separate them. She has no condition other than weakness”
The inmates had signed a note from the women’s prison in which they demanded their freedom and recalled “the poor health that the three of us presented.” They added that, for the same reason, their lives are at risk, and that if something happens to them “all justice will fall on their repressors.” They concluded the note with a “resistance salute from this cold shadow.”
On the other hand, Ana Belkis Ferrer, sister of José Daniel Ferrer, leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (Unpacu), denounced that the family has not heard from the activist for months, in prison since July 11, 2021, when he was arrested before that he could join the demonstrations that day.
The authorities have not allowed him to make phone calls since June 4. “Three months and 19 days half-naked, only in his underwear, full of mosquito bites, feeding on the pack that they are allowing him every 45 days and without the right to family and conjugal visits, as well as phone calls,” Ana Belkis Ferrer detailed in a Facebook post. “One year, two months and 12 days buried alive and slowly dying.”
On August 29, the Cuban Democratic Directorate joined opponents and activists from exile who asked for a life certificate for the Unpacu leader. Several activists from the organization expressed in a video their alarm at the fate of the opposition leader, “who is apparently confined in the Mar Verde prison”, in the province of Santiago de Cuba, but who “is not allowed to make phone calls” nor had received the last visit from relatives that corresponded to him then, the previous August 26.
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