Thaindian News

Havana, March 2 (IANS/EFE) The health of Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas, who has been on a hunger strike for five days calling for the release of the country’s roughly 200 political prisoners, was worsening and he was showing signs of acute dehydration, his mother said.
“He has symptoms of dehydration, headaches and joint pain,” Alicia Hernandez, a nurse by profession, said Monday regarding her son’s condition. “He is low in spirits, but he has not lost consciousness nor is he incoherent.”

Hernandez spoke to EFE by phone from the city of Santa Clara, 270 km east of Havana, and said that “every day” she insisted to her son that he stop his fast, but Farinas, 48, is determined to continue the protest and does not even want to go to the hospital to be examined.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the unofficial Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, Elizardo Sanchez, said that he is afraid Farinas will suffer an “organic collapse”, given that he has not eaten or drunk anything during the time he has been on the hunger strike.

The dissident’s mother said that her son’s constitution has been undermined by previous hunger strikes and that now, as on earlier occasions, she will take him to the hospital as soon as he loses consciousness.

Farinas has undertaken 23 hunger strikes since 1995, the longest of which lasted six months in 2006, when he spent periods of time in the hospital, where he was fed intravenously.

Last Thursday, the dissident sent to President Raul Castro, who formally succeeded ailing older brother Fidel two years ago, a letter in which he asked him to prove to the world that he is not “cruel and inhumane”.

Farinas, a psychologist and independent journalist, said last Friday that he decided to stop eating after being detained and beaten by police en route to the cemetery in the eastern town of Banes for the funeral of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a political prisoner who died last week after an 85-day hunger strike.

Also starting their own hunger strikes last week were four imprisoned dissidents identified by the rights commission as Eduardo Diaz Fleitas, Diosdado Gonzalez and Nelson Molinet, held at Kilo 5 prison; and Fidel Suarez Cruz, serving time at the Kilo 8 penitentiary. Both institutions are in the western province of Pinar del Rio.

All four were among 75 government opponents rounded up and jailed in 2003 on charges of conspiring with the US to undermine the Cuban revolution. While some of those dissidents have since been freed on medical grounds, more than 50 remain behind bars.

–IANS/EFE

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