Freed dissident: "The courage of the Cuban people is in my heart"

Madrid, Agencias
"This is not the end. I continue with the same spirit of struggle, I love my people and I will keep defending their dignity," freed Cuban political prisoner Prospero Gainza Aguero said Thursday on arriving in Madrid with his wife and son.

Gainza, 53, expressed his gratitude to the government of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero at the chance to feel "this new air" that is allowing him to resume his life in freedom.

The former prisoner was welcomed at the hostel in the Spanish capital where some of the more than two dozen Cuban dissidents freed earlier are still living and who, upon the arrival of Gainza and his family, gave vent to their joyful emotions and applauded.

Gainza said that wherever he might be he will continue fighting for a Cuba free of its current communist government.

"Therefore, I'll do everything possible to continue my struggle. The courage of the Cuban people is in my heart," he said.

He also said that the signs that the island's government has given by agreeing to free political prisoners could be just a minimal "course change," and he added that he did not have any thanks to give the Cuban regime for its efforts along those lines.

"Because I believe that a person who has suffered for so many years in prison today cannot give thanks to the one who made him suffer so much, much less to the Castro dictatorship," he said, by way of explaining that position.

Gainza also recalled the "difficult" days that he spent in prison, while his family fought for his release, as well as his anxieties about being near 6-year-old son Roinnis Gainza Blanco, who was born after his father's arrest and imprisonment.

"After so many years, to once again feel myself free, to be able to embrace that little boy I have and that doesn't know what the affection of his father is, the world will be able to imagine what someone like me can be feeling," he said.

Gainza, due to the awful conditions he experienced during his long imprisonment, today suffers from diabetes and his vision has been substantially reduced.

"They are psychological tortures that convert themselves into physical ones. The majority of us enter prison sane and come out sick," he said.

It was for "defending the rights of (the Cuban) people," according to Gainza, that he was sentenced to a prison term of 25 years on charges of conspiring with the United States to undermine the principles of the Cuban Revolution and the island's independence.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Havana announced last week that six more political prisoners - Gainza, Victor Arroyo Carmona, Alexis Rodriguez Fernandez, Leonel Grave de Peralta Almenares, Alfredo Dominguez Batista and Claro Sanchez Altarriba - had accepted "the proposal to leave prison and move to Spain."

With Gainza's arrival in Madrid, there are now 27 Cuban political prisoners who have traveled to Spain during the course of the releases brought about by the dialogue between the Catholic hierarchy and President Raul Castro, a process supported by the Spanish government.

The release of this new group of prisoners coincided this week with the visit to Cuba of a delegation from Spain's governing Socialist Party to check on the process, among other things.

The Castro government is more than halfway toward meeting its pledge that all 52 still-jailed members of the "Group of 75" dissidents rounded up and imprisoned in March 2003 would be released by the end of next month.