Conservative Spanish People’s Party leader Pablo Casado joined a protest against the Cuban government, stating that the Cuban regime was a “dictatorship”.
Daniel Llorente, an independent Cuban dissident who has repeatedly protested the communist regime by waving a U.S. flag in public, told the Cuban-American news outlet Radio Martí this weekend that police forcibly expelled him to Guyana in the dead of night, threatening to “disappear” him if he ever returned.
In what many observers are deeming an embarrassing rebuke of human rights activism on the island, the Communist Party of Cuba refused to allow Organization of American States (OAS) head Luis Almagro and former Mexican president Felipe Calderón enter the country.
Berta Soler, the leader of the anti-communist Cuban dissident group the Ladies in White, was arrested on Thursday after stepping outside her home, which is also the group’s headquarters.
The communist government of Cuba restored its iron-fisted control over pro-democracy activists last weekend, following mass arrests a week ago on the Sunday before President Barack Obama landed in Havana. An estimated 300 dissidents were beaten and arrested nationwide.
The bishop in charge of the pastoral care of prison inmates in Cuba declared Wednesday that Cuba is holding a number of political prisoners on the island, some of whom are serving long sentences, a claim that Havana has repeatedly denied.
A coalition of Cuban dissidents representing a number of anti-communist groups on the island have released a video denouncing the Islamist massacre in San Bernardino, California, featuring a moment of silence and a chant denouncing international terrorism.
Zaqueo Báez, the Cuban dissident arrested for approaching Pope Francis during his visit to the island and shouting the word “freedom,” was just freed from prison and is awaiting trial in the communist dictatorship for “public disorder” and “disrespect.”
As the Cuban government begins to free dissidents, imprisoned to keep them from potentially disrupting Pope Francis’s visit with their presence, dissident organizations are releasing statistics on just how many people were arrested.
Among the many foreign policy disasters for which President Barack Obama has been responsible, none is uglier than the recent Cuba deal. We are less safe because of Iran, Russia, and ISIS, But the Cuba deal has made us less free.
Two of Cuba’s most prominent anti-communist leaders refused to meet with American Secretary of State John Kerry during his visit to Havana last weekend, condemning the Obama administration for “caving” to Castro regime demands and meeting only privately for a social event with the dissidents.
The Obama administration has yet to question American Alan Gross about his lengthy imprisonment in Cuba–six months after he returned home in a prisoner swap that set the stage for full normalization of U.S.-Cuban relations this week, the Daily Beast reports. Though Gross spent more than five years in a Cuban prison, and could potentially provide valuable intelligence on the regime, as well as information about political prisoners, the Obama administration showed no interest.
