An Unpacu Activist Dies in Santiago de Cuba

Unpacu activist Alfonso Chaviano Peláez, who died this Wednesday. (Capture)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 6 May 2022 — The activist Alfonso Chaviano Peláez, of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (Unpacu) and promoter of Cuba Decide, died on Wednesday in Santiago de Cuba.

As detailed by Ana Belkis Ferrer on Twitter, Peláez had recently been arrested, “violated and threatened by Castro hitmen.”

Chaviano Peláez himself recounted on April 15 that he had been arrested at the Unpacu headquarters when he was about to receive food for the needy. In a video shared on YouTube, the activist reported that a police officer “in a very violent way” forced him to get in a patrol car and took him to the military hospital.

“All these moves have been with pressure on my forearms and they always left me very sore,” Peláez said in his message, published two days after his arrest.

In his history, the activist had already accumulated other arrests and suffered from a lung disease that had forced him to undergo a tracheostomy.

On the other hand, the daughter of Eldris González Pozo confirmed that her father underwent emergency surgery, after suffering a heart attack on May 3 at the Boniato prison and while waiting to be transferred to the Confianza correctional facility.

According to what Evelin González told Radio Televisión Martí, while he was being treated “for his leg problem,” González Pozo vomited blood and fainted, they operated on him quickly and he is “serious, but stable.”

González Pozo is a self-employed person sentenced to three years in prison for the crimes of assault, contempt and disobedience. A member of the Eastern Democratic Alliance, he went on a hunger strike in April last year to protest his arrest.

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