Babalu Blog: A True Hunger Strike: "A True Hunger Strike
While the American and World press go gaga over Cindy Sheehan's and Hollywood celeb's 'rolling' hunger strike in protest to the War on Terror - a rolling hunger strike where the strikers take 24 hour shifts without food - very little is being said about a man who has been on a hunger strike for 168 days.
Guillermo Fariñas has gone one-hundred, sixty-eight days without food in protest of the Cuban government's prohibition of Internet Access.
Here's an excellent Opinion piece in today's Bradenton Herald:
Dignified protest: Journalist's hunger strike for Internet access shows the evil of Castro's rule
In a nation where freedom is against the law, where the slightest dissent can be met with a knock on the door by the secret police, some of the bravest outlaws in Fidel Castro's Cuba are its independent journalists. Each day, they put at risk what little liberty they enjoy to report the reality of the regime and of life under dictatorship. It is dangerous duty, and they know it, remembering each day the more than two dozen of their colleagues imprisoned in Castro's gulag.
Outside of prison, Cuba's independent journalists, armed with few resources other than the desire to tell the truth and a bias in favor of human rights and democracy, struggle to go beyond and, in most instances, undermine the official line from the state-run media.
In one dramatic instance, there is a Cuban journalist ready to die for the right to tell his stories.
Since Jan. 31, psychologist-turned-journalist Guillermo Fariñas, 43, has been on a hunger strike to protest a government ban on him using the Internet to transmit his work to the outside world. The government moved against Fariñas, a long-time dissident, after the Miami Herald described a confrontation he had with a pro-Castro mob, which challenged him to denounce the Cuban president.
'I got on my knees and said, 'Down With Fidel!'' Fariñas "
(sigue on babalu site Babalu Blog: A True Hunger Strike:)
