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.
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@elnuevoherald.com
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.
Biscet accused the Cuban government in the mid-1990s of allowing and
covering up botched abortions, and was imprisoned from 1999 to late
2002. He had been free for 37 days when he was arrested again. President
George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008.
During the U2 concert last week at the Sun Life Stadium in Miami
Gardens, Bono praised Biscet and declared that "some day soon Cuba will
be free" before a crowd of 73,000.
"We'd like to do something we've never done before," Bono declared as he
urged the audience to hold up their hands. "A beautiful man, a doctor
who spent time in the prisons of Cuba. He was released. His name is
Doctor Biscet."
"I want you to hold him up and let everyone in Cuba know he is special
to us and we are watching, we are watching," he added "Hold him in your
thoughts. Hold him in your prayers."
The praise came during a regular segment of U2 concerts in which the
band celebrates human rights as people walk around the stage carrying
paper lanterns with the symbol of the London-based Amnesty International.
Bono had met the previous week in Washington with U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz
Balart and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, both Florida Republicans, who urged
him to take note of Biscet and Cuba's record of human rights abuses.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/08/2304274/cuban-dissident-praised-by-bono.html
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