Cuban Writer Angel Santiesteban Gets 5-Year Prison Sentence
HAVANA TIMES — Cuban writer and dissident Angel Santiesteban Prats was sentenced on Saturday to five years in jail after being convicted of the crimes of physical assault and trespassing, reports the Café Fuerte website.
The 2006 Casa de las Americas Prize award winner called the sentence “absurd” and “unjust” and said he would appeal to the Supreme Court, which he has ten days to do.
“After the trial, I thought I would be acquitted, but we know that the entire judicial system is a farce,” said Santiesteban Prats.
The former wife of the author and blogger for the site Los hijos que nadie quiso is ready to shoot a video “to show what they have used and pressured her with,” said the dissident writer.
Santiesteban Prats was one of the people arrested on November 8 when they went to a police station in Havana to inquire about other arrested opposition figures.
The award-winning Cuban intellectual has won the Juan Rulfo Prize for Radio France International, Alejo Carpentier Prize of the Cuban Book Institute and the National Prize of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC).
Sadly, British and other foreign trade unions have been hoodwinked into “solidarity” with the Cuban regime over the trumped up distraction of the Cuban Five. They ignore the brutal fact that the Cuban government allows no independent trade unions and has banned all strikes for 54 years. Critics of Europe’s favourite dictatorship don’t get any support from the European unions.
Where is the Cuba Solidarity Campaign or where are the British trade unions affiliated to it when called upon to show solidarity with real Cubans?
Here is one of Angel’s first posts from when he started his blog in 2009:
“MY WRITER FRIENDS TELL ME that to do a blog is to do politics, that I must confine myself to literature, this is the way to defend it, continuing to publish in my country, surviving with the status of a writer. That walking around on the Internet is a way to lead myself into the swamp, evasive, illegal, free-willed, to turn into a wild animal.
…My skilled friends want to take a cynical attitude, as their way of protecting me, as they have done to protect their own existence. But as much as I explain this venture into a blog as a way to continue my role as a spectator and writer, they can’t understand. They toss me a look that says, “There you go, don’t complain when they show you the instruments.”
My illustrious friends are admired by me: I don’t have their capacity to stay quiet. I don’t have their resistance to the sound of silence. I don’t enjoy it when they throw bread crumbs but not the bread. At times, I envy them, because only I know what perks I reject, in exchange for all the disdain I receive.
My thinking friends will have to accept me as I accept them.”
http://hijosnadieeng.wordpress.com/2009/12/10/21/
I’ll be your ‘Castro syncophant’ for I am your Nemesis.
I’ll just say: I don’t know what happened.
The case has been for over 3 years.
Maybe he’s guilty, maybe he’s not. According to all sources available there aren’t any details about what he did or not to his ex-wife. One’s deeds don’t exempt one’s misfortunous ways.
Maybe the story is mistelled, as we can only rely on the (in)famous Wilfredo Cancio Isla, who is proven to have been paid by the Us government to spill ‘Anti-Castro Propaganda’ when he was on the El Nuevo Herald.
Maybe the trial was poisoned, maybe it was wasn’t,
Maybe his appeal will be heard, maybe it won’t.
From all sources of available information, the only thing a serious person can say is: ‘I have no means to judge’.
—
Turning the weapon against the marksman on your ever-lasting death-wish:
I wish you to die.
I wish your wife dies.
I wish your children dies.
I wish your mother and father to die.
I wish all your beloved ones to die.
Why?
I hate you and everything you represent. Because you have been poisoning this wonderful site for months with your vile bile.
Feels good?
Nice.
You deserve it.
The usual suspects are strangely silent. It’s easy to dissemble theoretical constructs but much harder to defend naked police state brutality.
PLEASE, PLEASE let there be one Castro syncophant who can justify to me why this man should go to jail for five minutes, let alone five years. If there be one, please do not justify his incarceration by the injustice borne by the five Cuban spies. Please do not tell me that it’s because of a “seige mentality” owed to 53 years of US embargo, and please don’t excuse this “banana republic”-style justice on the sovereignty of Cuba to treat its citizens, fellow human beings, in whatever fashion they please. Before you respond, please make sure you know exactly what he did to merit this sentence. A good start would be to read the two links that Griffin posted earlier. The odious Castro regime will have to answer for these barbaries. Both on this side of the grave and on the other. The sooner the better.
Angel posted these 2 reports on his arrest and maltreatment:
http://hijosnadieeng.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/facing-state-counterintelligence-part-1/
http://hijosnadieeng.wordpress.com/2012/12/09/facing-state-counterintelligence-part-2/
What kind of system fear writers?