AP Interview: Hunger striker says refusing food, water until death can make Cuban gov’t listen

Cuban hunger striker vows to go until he dies

SANTA CLARA, Cuba — A dissident journalist who has gone nine days without eating or drinking told The Associated Press on Friday that he is willing to give his life to call attention to the plight of Cuba’s political prisoners.

If he does, Guillermo Farinas would be the second hunger striker to die on the communist island in as many weeks, and his death would be sure to spark a new round of international condemnation of the Castro government.

“There are moments in the lives of nations where martyrs are needed and I think that moment has arrived,” Farinas, gaunt, bald and with fallow brown eyes, said during an interview at his shabby, two-story home with walls of faded pink and lime-green.

Farinas was hospitalized Wednesday after briefly losing consciousness. Doctors gave him fluids intravenously, then sent him home, saying there was little more they could do if he refused to eat.

Farinas is already approaching the limit of how long most people can go without water. But his family plans to hospitalize him each time he losses consciousness, meaning more fluid treatments that could keep him alive for weeks.

He said doctors told him it will take five or six more days before he again reaches crisis stage.

A psychologist, Farinas became so frustrated with Cuba’s single-party communist system that, in 2004, he began working for Cubanacan Press, a small dissident news agency reporting on the hardships of daily life.

Now 48, Farinas has held 22 other hunger strikes in the past 15 years, and has been jailed repeatedly for dissident activities on charges including disrespecting authority, public disorder and assault against a suspected undercover government informant.

This time, he stopped eating and drinking on Feb. 24, the day after jailed dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo died following an 83-day hunger strike in which he only accepted vitamin-fortified liquids. Farinas is demanding the release of 26 political prisoners he says are in poor health.

Zapata Tamayo’s death — the first by a hunger striker in Cuba in nearly 40 years — led Spain’s socialist prime minister to call for the release of all Cuban “prisoners of conscience.” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. government was “deeply distressed.”

Farinas wore white pajamas and moved slowly and deliberately Friday, an aluminum walking stick by his side. He removed his shirt to reveal a rail-thin frame and stomach dotted with scars where the government force-fed him during past hunger strikes.

“This is the only way I have to protest against the Cuban government and to show they are villains,” he said when asked why he has resorted to refusing to eat or drink so often. “What other option have I got?”

Seated on a wicker-backed couch, with a photo of himself beaming as a baby nearby, Farinas looked reasonably strong. He acknowledged feeling better since doctors inserted an IV in his neck and gave him eight liters of fluids and nutrients — but said the hunger strike has left him weak, with flulike symptoms, a burning throat and back pain.

“This is not a suicide, because I’m asking for something logical. I’m not asking that they give me power,” he said. “I’m not asking that Raul (Castro) leave the country on a plane. I’m only asking that they free 26 prisoners who even the state doctors have determined are in no condition to be in jail.”

Farinas lives in Santa Clara, a central Cuban city famous for its towering statue of Che Guevara and a mausoleum holding his remains.

Farinas said he takes calls daily from European embassies in Havana, as well as the U.S. Interests Section, which Washington keeps on the island because it has no diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Hunger strikes present challenges for authorities in any country since force-feeding can be a human rights violation. At the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, for instance, more than 130 terror suspects have refused meals at different times. In some cases, that has prompted officials to put inmates into a restraint chair and insert feeding tubes into their noses, forcing them to take milky nutritional supplements, mixed with water and olive oil.

Members of Cuba’s opposition community vowed to seize the moment of international outrage over Zapata Tamayo’s death to press for change on the island, which has tolerated little dissent since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Farinas said he was convinced the Cuban government would let him die this time. Given the economic crisis on the island, he said, the government cannot afford to appear weak by giving into his demands. He said he is not willing to call off the strike because he thinks his comrades in jail will die if not released.

“They (the government) don’t have the luxury of giving up, and I don’t either,” he said.

Cuba’s Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a Havana-based group which the government does not recognize but largely tolerates, says there are about 200 political prisoners on the island.

Four jailed dissidents who began hunger strikes shortly after Zapata Tamayo’s death ended them after just a few days.

How many Cubans are even aware of Farinas’ protest is unclear. There has been no mention of it in the official press, and access to the Internet — where many opposition figures have blogs — is restricted and prohibitively expensive.

While state-media has ignored Farinas, the government has been surprisingly open about Zapata Tamayo’s case.

President Raul Castro made a rare statement following his death, denying that he was tortured or executed but adding that he regretted what happened. Castro also blamed problems on the island on Washington’s 48-year trade embargo. Fidel Castro also alluded to Zapata Tamayo in a newspaper column, though he did not mention him by name.

On Monday, the government devoted a third of its nightly newscast to countering claims that doctors let Zapata Tamayo die. That report even included what appeared to be footage from a hidden camera of Zapata Tamayo’s mother thanking a state doctor for trying to save him.

Ann Louise Bardach, a Cuba expert at the Brookings Institute and author of the book “Without Fidel,” said the video of Zapata Tamayo’s mother could backfire on the government.

“The average Cuban looks at that and says, ‘Oh my God, they are spying on her even in her moment of grief,” she said. “And that resonates with Cubans.”

Bardach said the twin hunger strikes could for the first time in recent memory thrust the opposition into a larger role — and that the government is concerned.

“We are seeing now for the very first time that the opposition is getting some traction,” she said. “When both Fidel and Raul Castro for the first time in history feel compelled to make a statement within 48 hours of a prisoner’s death, they are worried.”

Farinas said he hasn’t told his 8-year-old daughter that he is planning to stay on the hunger strike until he dies. All she knows is that he has been sick.

“I’m thinking of her,” he said. “But more than in the love I have for my daughter, I am thinking of the love I have for my country.”