Link for today: A hero in Castro’s gulag
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/11/04/a_hero_in_castros_gulag/
Another nonperson. A quote from the article:
Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet will spend the day locked in a fetid cell in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, where he is serving a 25-year prison sentence for speaking out against Fidel Castro’s dictatorship.
Peter Kirsanow, a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, has written that the conditions of Biscet’s incarceration are like something out of Victor Hugo: “windowless and suffocating, with wretched sanitary conditions. The stench seeping from the pit in the ground that serves as a toilet is intensified by being compressed into an unventilated cell only as wide as a broom closet. . . . Biscet reportedly suffers from osteoarthritis, ulcers, and hypertension. His teeth, those that haven’t fallen out, are rotted and infected.”
A prolife Christian physician, Biscet first ran afoul of the Castro regime in the 1990s, when he investigated Cuban abortion techniques – Cuba has by far the highest abortion rates in the Western Hemisphere – and revealed that numerous infants had been killed after being delivered alive. In 1997, he began the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights, which seeks “to establish in Cuba a state based on the rule of law” and “sustained upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” In 1999, he was given a three-year sentence for “disrespecting patriotic symbols.” To protest the regime’s repression, he had hung a Cuban flag upside down.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
