Link to Story: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/cuba/story/1330443.html
Cuban hunger striker reported very ill
November 13th, 2009 - Leading Cuban dissident Martha Beatriz Roque is extremely ill due to complications from her diabetes and a liquids-only fast launched to protest the government, another dissident reported Thursday.
``A doctor who visited her this morning said she may not last the day,'' said Vladimiro Roca in the early afternoon. By early evening, he reported later, she was ``not worse, but not better either.''
The 64-year-old Roque, who is diabetic and has suffered two heart attacks, was released from prison in 2004 because of her health. She had been sentenced to 20 years during the 2003 crackdown on dissidents known as ``Black Spring.''
An economist, Roque is one of the most active and best-known dissidents in
Roque, Roca and six other dissidents launched the fast Tuesday -- a younger dissident is on a total hunger strike -- to intensify a month-long sit-in protest at Roca's
A senior state security official paid a ``personal'' visit to the house Thursday and asked to speak to her, but offered no conciliation, Roci said. So she refused to see him.
She fainted twice Wednesday and had staying in his bedroom Thursday, conscious but weak and suffering from strong headaches, added Roca, a former Cuban air force combat pilot and son of a leader of the island's pre-Castro communist party.
An emergency ambulance crew apparently called by state security agents checked on Roque four times Wednesday. The crew's doctor asked her to sign a document saying she was continuing the fast on her own responsibility, but she refused,
He said her parish priest gave her communion and the sacrament of the sick, formerly known as extreme unction, on Wednesday night. And during a fifth visit Thursday the ambulance doctor said that Roque could swiftly suffer a collapsed lung and die.
Roque takes medication to control her blood sugar, not insulin injections, he added. But the liquids-only fast does not allow the careful control of diet that diabetics require, he added.
``We hold the Cuban government and the State Security responsible for what could happen to Martha,'' Roca told El Nuevo Herald during one of two telephone interviews from
The nine have been staging a sit-in at
``It's not about the camera itself, but about the right [to work and to free expression and information] implicit in the camera, the right that they are violating,'' said
But as time passed the group was increasingly harassed by pro-government neighborhood groups and government officials.
Roca's house has been virtually sealed off for days by pro-government groups, said Elizardo Sánchez, head of the illegal but tolerated Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.
Sánchez added that October saw a worrisome increase in the number of ``arbitrary detentions'' -- usually brief harassing detentions of dissidents -- that totaled 48 such detentions of 92 persons.
``That is much, much higher than in September,'' he said.
###
Donations can be sent to the
"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment