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Most readers have probably never heard of González Leiva. Indeed, the dissidents who languish in Castro’s jails typically remain nameless and faceless to the American public, despite being 90 miles from our shores. For every Armando Valladares—the Cuban poet who was held for 22 harrowing years before an international campaign helped gained his release in 1982—there are thousands of other brave souls whose pleas were never answered. Human-rights groups estimate that there are currently more than 300 “prisoners of conscience” in Cuba...
Someone who has worked tirelessly on behalf of these prisoners is Laida Carro, the president of the Coalition of Cuban-American Women. “I feel like I’m struggling with them,” she says. “They’re very special people, and what they’re going through is hell.” Carro stresses how vitally important it is that their stories be told. Allow me, then, to briefly share the story of Juan Carlos González Leiva, along with that of another awe-inspiring Cuban hero...
González Leiva, 38, is the president of both the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights and the Brotherhood for the Independent Blind People of Cuba. He is also the director of the Ignacio Agramonte Independent Library. He earned his law degree (remarkably) while completely blind, but has been prohibited from practicing ever since the regime learned of his oppositionist activities. On March 4, 2002, he organized a peaceful protest outside the Ciego de Avila city hospital to express solidarity with an independent journalist, Jesús Alvarez Castillo, who had been brutally beaten by Cuban State Security. Along with...
Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, 58, is also critically ill. She is the director of the Cuban Institute of Independent Economists, founder of the Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba and the recipient of the 2002 Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award, bestowed by the New York Academy of Sciences. First jailed in 1997 for co-authoring a paper critical of the Communist system, she was released in May 2000—only to be incarcerated again this past March for meeting with U.S. diplomats and publicly demanding freedom for Cuban political prisoners. This time, she was given...
Omar López Montenegro of the Cuban American National Foundation, himself a founding member of the Cuban opposition, nonetheless tells me how effective a campus movement, particularly one at Harvard, might be in focusing attention on the prisoners’ plight. “The regime always claims that the ‘students of the world’ are with the revolution,” López observes, and a student-led campaign for human rights in Cuba would shatter these illusions. To that end, Carro suggests creating “a program whereby students would adopt...