Cuban Activist Tomas Nunez Magdariaga Released After Long Hunger Strike

Cuban activist Tomas Núñez Magdariaga.

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 15 October 2018 — On Monday afternoon, after a 62-day hunger strike, Cuban activist Tomas Núñez Magdariaga was released from prison, according to government opponent Carlos Amel Oliva of the Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU), who spoke with 14ymedio.

A vehicle with two State Security officers transferred Núñez Magdariaga from the Juan Bruno Zayas hospital in Santiago de Cuba, where he was hospitalized, to his home, although it is still unknown whether he will remain on house arrest or if the release is total.

According to Oliva, Major Granja, head of the Aguadores prison where the activist was imprisoned, went to the hospital and told Magdariaga “you have immediate release.” A doctor helped to make a list of directions for how he should start eating again and within a few minutes he was transferred.

UNPACU’s leader José Daniel Ferrer expressed his thanks via Twitter for the support received inside and outside Cuba. “There are many who have made this victory of good against evil possible,” said the former prisoner of the Black Spring of 2013.

#Cuba Thanks to all those who with their firmness and solidarity have made it possible for the Castro-communist tyranny to free our brother Tomás Núñez Magdariaga. Tyranny imprisoned him unjustly, tortured him and if there had not been so much solidarity, they would have killed him.

— José Daniel Ferrer (@jdanielferrer) 16 de octubre de 2018

Nuñez Magdariaga had gone on a hunger strike to denounce his sentence of one year in prison and in the last week he rejected the serums necessary to keep him alive.

The activist was accused of “threatening” an agent of the political police, but the person who made the accusation retracted it and claimed that he was blackmailed by the State Security to accuse the activist in exchange for a job and housing.

The archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, Dionisio García Ibáñez, visited the activist and, according to what Carlos Amel Oliva reported to this newspaper, the archbishop told him that Núñez Magdariaga “would be released in a couple of days because the case did not hold up.”

The US government also expressed its “serious” concern for the health of the opponent and called for his immediate release.

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