Paya denounces prison conditions for members of Varela Project

Havana, Cuba, May 27, 2009 / 16:01 pm

The leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, Oswaldo Paya, denounced the inhuman conditions at the federal prison in Pinar del Rio, where Varela Project member Victor Rolando Arroyo Carmona is incarcerated and has been on a hunger strike since May 15 to protest the poor treatment.

In a recent press release, Paya said that Arroyo Carmona, a journalist and promoter of the Varela Project, was “unjustly condemned to 26 years in prison in April of 2003. His protest is over the lack of medical care, the overcrowding of 130 prisoners in a single hallway for months, the denial of chaplain visits and the cruel and degrading treatment to which he is subjected.”

After noting that Arroyo Carmona is “allowed to see the sun just once per month,” Paya reported that “while he was confined to the hellish [Cuban] prison in Guantanamo, Victor Rolando Arroyo Carmona was on a hunger strike for 25 days to protest the same inhumane conditions there. Both at the Guantanamo prison and the prison at Pinar del Rio…as well as at so many other Cuban prisons, the conditions in which prisoners are keep and the treatment they receive constitute true torture.”

Given this treatment, Paya called on “the entire international community and especially Cubans to demand the liberation of Victor Rolando Arroyo Carmona and of all prisoners of conscience being held in Cuban prisons, to thus defend their freedom and their lives.”

“Let all Cubans remember that if Victor Rolando Arroyo Carmona and all peaceful Cuban political prisoners are unjustly incarcerated in inhumane conditions, it is for peacefully defending the rights and dignity of Cubans themselves,” Paya said.