Former prisoner of conscience Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet has publicly refused to comply with the Castro regime’s order that he report to the local police station on a monthly basis. The order came as the Castro dictatorship began to perceive increased international support and notoriety for the courageous opposition leader, and is a transparent attempt to control and intimidate the peaceful democracy activist.
Cuban dissident praised by Bono ordered to report to police
Cuban dissident Oscar Elias Biscet, freed in March after eight years in prison, says he won’t follow an order to report to police.
One week after rock icon Bono honored him during a U2 concert in Miami, Cuban dissident Oscar Elias Biscet has been ordered by police to check in once a month because of his pending 25-year prison sentence.
“While Bono praises me, the government represses me,” Biscet said Thursday, adding that he will refuse to obey the order because there were not conditions when he was freed in March after eight years in prison.
One of Cuba’s best-known opposition activists, he was freed as part of the Raúl Castro government decision to release more than 125 political prisoners over the past year under so-called “extra penal licenses.”
But Biscet, who was serving a 25-year sentence since a 2003 crackdown on 75 dissidents known as Cuba’s Black Spring, is the only one known to have been ordered to report to police as though he was on parole.
“It could be that the government was upset with the words of the singer Bono,” the 49-year-old physician told El Nuevo Herald by phone from his home in Havana.
Biscet said he went to a government office earlier this week to update his national ID card but was told to go to a police station near his home, where he was ordered to check in each month from the fist to the fifth.
Police also opened a file with his personal details and photo, he added, “which means that I am only half-free, not fully free, and that my case remains pending and is not closed.
Biscet added that the order violated Castro’s promise to Catholic Cardinal Jaime Ortega last year to release the political prisoners without conditions. Efforts to contact Ortega’s office in Havana on Thursday were unsuccessful.
Biscet said that he did not know for sure whether the sign-in order is part of a calculated government effort to intimidate him or merely a bad decision by some bureaucrat — but he has an idea.
“I am followed every day, every hour, by State Security agents. So they know about and are complicit” in the requirement, Biscet alleged.