Cuba Accepts neither Pressures nor Blackmails  

By Alberto Núñez Betancourt

Taken from Granma

Important western media groups are attracting attention again with a prefabricated lie, thus responding to the imperialist interests against our country. 

While Cuba is carrying out the anti-polio vaccination campaign, which preserves the health of over half a million children and hundreds of Cuban doctors reaffirm their humanistic spirit of the struggle for life in devastated Haiti, ill-willed headlines take great pains in orchestrating a campaign in favor of counterrevolutionary Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez, on a hunger strike, in Santa Clara, for 13 days, with which, thus he has declared, to try to impose the release of over 20 counterrevolutionary prisoners, sanctioned with all bonds for court costs by our tribunals; for acting at the service of foreign interests, against the independence and the constitutional order of our country.

The manipulation is so huge that journalistic reports manage to say that the Cuban government has indicated to let die this employee of the United States Interests Section in Havana, without saying a word about the multiple efforts of our health professionals for assisting that person.

Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez, known in the environment of homeland sellers as "Coco", moves from a stand very close to the Revolution, to an antisocial behavior.

The first public act that revealed the clear unbalance of his personality, and which had no political nuance, happened in late 1995, when he attacked a woman physically, employee at the health institution where he worked as a psychologist, causing her multiple injuries on the face and arms. The offense provoked a sanction of three years of freedom deprivation without internment, besides the imposition of a 600-peso fine.

To evade justice he invented his first hunger strike and shortly after crossed over the threshold of the counterrevolutionary activism.

With the collaboration of those small groups he disclosed his case, made a great number of distortions through subversive radio stations, besides expressing his willingness to die if the authorities did not give response to the demands he pleased.

A second event in 2002 ratifies the violent nature of this individual and is the evident scorn for his homeland and the citizens who defend it. Right in the middle of the city of Santa Clara, Fariñas strongly beat with his walking cane an elder who had stopped a terrorist act by a personal envoy of criminal Luis Posada Carriles.

Harms in the injured elder caused an urgent surgery to remove the spleen.

Once sanctioned to five years and ten months of imprisonment in Trial 569/2002 of the People’s Provincial Tribunal of Villa Clara, he resorted again to his method of making show: the hunger strike.

At that time, the stand sustained by Fariñas Hernandez caused him a slight dehydration, which is why doctors suggested a treatment with serums. He suspended the strike and on November 4, 2002, decided to resume it, demanding the installation of a TV set in the nursing room of the prison where he was recovering.

On December 5, 2003, in view of his health complaints, he was granted an extra-penal licence (article 31, items 3.b and 4, of the Penal Code, establishes the faculty of granting the suspension of the internment of the individual sanctioned to freedom deprivation for justified causes, on the ground that he behaves well), in the compliance with our laws and on the basis of the humanitarian conception of our law and penitentiary system.

Three years later, this agent at the service of the United States carried out a prolonged fast demanding ETECSA officers access to the Internet from his home. Fariñas is a regular reporter of the infamous radio station named ‘Radio Marti’ and of other anti-Cuban broadcasting stations.

His service sheet is also broad in the assistance to activities of all kind of the USIS and some European embassies that direct subversion in Cuba, from which he receives instructions, money and supplies.

There are bioethicl principles that force a physician to respect the decision of a person who has decided to begin a hunger strike.

Therefore, by no means he can be forced to eat, as US authorities do every day in the jails and torture centers of the Guantanamo Naval Base, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, violating the rights of the detainees.

Medicine can only act when the patient has gone into shock, stage in which it is late as a rule, because the human being is in survival limits, what is called point of no return.

As a result of successive episodes of hunger strike, Fariñas’ organism is now in a period of a sharp deterioration.

If he’s alive today, we have to say so; it’s thanks to the qualified medical care he has received no matter his mercenary status.

In this case, it is not medicine that should resolve the problem intentionally created with the aim of discrediting our political system, but the patient himself and unpatriotic people, foreign diplomats and press that manipulate him. The consequences will be completely and only their responsibility. 

Cuba, which has amply shown it has human being’s life and dignity as a main emblem, will not accept pressures or blackmails.

Cubasí Translation Staff