Fidel Blinks
By CBS News Producer Portia Siegelbaum
The wife of an imprisoned Cuban dissident emerged from their first visit in 83 days saying that only an unprecedented public protest won her husband's transfer to a Havana hospital.
"This is the first time we've gone to the Council of State to raise a scandal, as they say," Berta Soler said, referring to the nearly two days she and a small group of supporters spent defiantly in a public park adjacent to Revolution Square, normally the site of massive pro-government rallies.
The Castro government does not tolerate public protests. Therefore, dissidents hold anti-government activities inside private homes. In the last year however, the wives of some of the 75 dissidents jailed in the spring of 2003 have reached out to the foreign press to publicize their cause.
They began dressing completely in white and attending the same Sunday Mass. Several of these "ladies in white", as they're known, joined Soler in her two-day sit-in Communications Park.
Soler launched her protest Tuesday, after delivering a handwritten appeal to President Fidel Castro. In it she asked for the immediate transfer of her husband Angel Moya Acosta, who has been diagnosed with a herniated disk, to a hospital in the Cuban capital.
Moya, a human rights activist has been serving a 20 year sentence in Las Mangas prison some 500 miles away in Granma province. The 40-year old construction worker was swept up in the government crackdown on 75 dissidents accused of conspiring with the United States Government and receiving financial support to overthrow the communist government. Seven of the 75 have been released for health reasons in the last few months.
On Thursday, Berta Soler decried the deterioration in her husband's condition since July 16 when she was last allowed to visit him. She accused the Interior Ministry of delaying proper medical treatment.
"I think they were playing a diabolical game with me," she told CBS News.
Moya, she says, is now in the regular orthopedic ward of Havana's Carlos J. Finlay Military Hospital, where according to Soler, the doctors have already begun diagnostic testing to determine the best treatment.
Soler admits that a government official advised her on Wednesday that her husband would be transferred to a Havana hopsital, but she decided to dig in her heels and stay in the park anyway.
According to Soler, her protest ended abruptly when the government sent some 40 plainclothes security agents to move her out in the early hours of Thursday.
She and nine supporters were hustled into unmarked police cars and driven to their homes, says Soler, and along the way she argued with the four government agents.
"When they said you shouldn't have called the foreign press, I asked, who should I call? It's the only way I have to let people, not here in Cuba but abroad, know what's happening," Soler said. There has been no coverage in the State-run local media of the issue.
By mid-day Thursday, she says, a government representative gave her the news that Moya was on his way to Havana and that she would be able to see him in a few hours.
"I expected this result from the pressure and if I didn't get it I would have applied even more pressure, would have raised the ante," Soler said with a shrug. "All the country's political prisoners should be freed but at this moment ...all I've been asking for is a temporary reprieve for a man to have an operation for his health."