Center for a Free Cuba. Washington DC, October 18, 2024. The following message was sent to international human rights organizations, civic leaders, and members of parliament.

Dear Colleague,

Oscar Elias Biscet, Cuban human rights advocate and former prisoner of conscience was arrested by the dictatorship’s political police in Havana around noon today as Cuba suffers nationwide blackouts.

His whereabouts are unknown and the writ of habeas corpus is not respected by the authorities.

Several Cubans have died while in police custody.  Biscet is a physician who has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the United States. He is a follower of the civil disobedience doctrines of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Cuba has more than one thousand one hundred political prisoners sentenced to unjust prison terms arbitrarily by kangaroo courts. Havana refuses to permit visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Cuba’s prisons, and other human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch to enter the island.

The Center for a Free Cuba calls on the international community to demand their immediate release. The European Union should suspend its economic assistance treaty with Havana until Cuban political prisoners are released.  In a petition circulating in various capitals, thousands are asking that Cuba be suspended from the UN Council on Human Rights.

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