Word: leiva
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Those words come from a statement released by blind Cuban lawyer Juan Carlos González 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 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...