The pain and anguish felt by the victims of the scheme concocted last summer by Spain and the Cuban Catholic Church in complicity with the Cuban dictatorship is still present. Cloaking the continued violation of the human rights of Cuba’s peaceful opposition in a deceitful rag, Spain and the Cuban Catholic Church became willing accomplices in assisting the vile Castro regime to rid itself of dissidents by forced exile and banishment to a foreign country.
However, it is apparent that neither Spain nor the Cuban Catholic Church ever took into consideration the fact that these brave and courageous men were imprisoned in Cuba for speaking out against injustice. It seems neither of them expected these freedom fighters to continue to speak out and call attention to the violation of their human rights. Normando Hernandez Gonzalez is one of those brave men who will not sit by silently as the insipid Cuban church and the surreptitious Spanish government do the dirty work of the brutal Cuban dictatorship.
Cuban Political Exile, Now in Miami, Recalls Abuse in Spain
Freed from one of Cuba’s worst prisons, Kilo 7, after more than seven years, journalist Normando Hernandez Gonzalez arrived in Miami last week after a jarring 10 months at a shabby hostel in an industrial section of Madrid.
On Friday, I met with him at his mother’s modest pink home in a section of this city unfrequented by the tanned, oiled and lubricated crowds of South Beach just a few miles away.
Yarai, his wife, and their 9-year-old daughter, Daniela, joined us as we spoke about the terrible last years, a conversation that continued at Bloomberg’s offices downtown. Anna Kushner, a former staff member at the PEN American Center who had been on the case from the beginning, served as interpreter.
Hernandez belonged to a group of Cuban dissidents released last July through the intercession of the Catholic Church and flown to Madrid.
Instead of freedom, he told me, they often found themselves treated contemptuously and sometimes cruelly.
“We had no status in Spain, ninguno,” said Hernandez. “Once we arrived, we asked for political asylum. We got no response. By the time I left after 10 months, the Spanish government, in violation of its own law, had still not responded to my petition for political asylum.”
Continue reading Normando’s story of abuse in Spain HERE.
Pawns and bargaining chips, even if human, are never treated like people. Nobody cares about their rights.