Word: gonzã
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Those words come from a statement released by blind Cuban lawyer Juan Carlos Gonz??lez Leiva this past July. Through his wife, Marítza Calderin Columbié, he has been smuggling out such messages ever since his incarceration in March 2002. In his most recent letter, dated Sept. 16, he reports that prison officials are “releasing chemical or biological substances [in his cell]…that are making me progressively very...
Most readers have probably never heard of Gonz??lez 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...
...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 Gonz??lez Leiva, along with that of another awe-inspiring Cuban hero...
...Gonz??lez 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...
...date, there’s been no organized show of support for Gonz??lez Leiva at Harvard Law School, and nothing in the economics department for Martha Roque. In all likelihood, few professors or students even know their names. The same can undoubtedly be said for most American universities...