Monday, January 22, 2018

Update: Cuban prisoner of conscience Eduardo Cardet badly beaten, stabbed and unjustly imprisoned

Regis Iglesias Ramirez, a former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, is currently the spokesman of the Christian Liberation Movement. This past Sunday, January 21, 2018 he sat down and gave a brief interview on the plight of  Eduardo Cardet Concepción, the national coordinator of the Christian Liberation Movement. The interview is in Spanish but a summary of the information provided is reproduced below in English.

Eduardo Cardet of MCL badly beaten, stabbed, and unjustly imprisoned.
Eduardo Cardet Concepción, successor to martyred founding leader of the Christian Liberation Movement, Oswaldo Paya, and unjustly jailed since November 30, 2016 was badly beaten and stabbed twice by three prisoners on December 19, 2017. This attack was most probably engineered by Castro's State Security in order to permanently silence him.

The seriousness of the attack was only learned on January 15, 2018 when his wife was finally able to visit him in prison and see the extent of his injuries.

Eduardo Cardet Concepción is a Cuban physician, human rights defender, and national coordinator of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL). He joined the MCL then headed by Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas in the early 2000s.  Eduardo was an active participant in various MCL initiatives aimed at achieving a nonviolent transition to democracy in Cuba. He was a manager of the Varela Project, the Heredia Project, The Peoples Path and  One Cuban, One Vote. Cardet held various responsibilities within the organization and was a member of the movement's coordinating council.

Following the extrajudicial killing of Oswaldo Payá  and Harold Cepero on July 22, 2012, the Christian Liberation Movement restructured its leadership and Eduardo Cardet was appointed national coordinator of the movement in November of 2014.

 
Due to his opposition activity Eduardo Cardet has been arbitrarily detained on several occasions. The last time he was taken prisoner by the Cuban political police was on November 30, 2016, shortly after the death of Fidel Castro. The MCL has denounced that on that occasion he was also badly beaten by Castro's state security agents. The beatings continued following his arrest in the detention center. 


On January 31, 2017 Amnesty International issued an urgent action and recognized Eduardo Cardet as a prisoner of conscience. Despite this status and the call for his immediate release, Cardet was sentenced to three years in prison on March 20, 2017 following a show trial in Cuba.  


Yaimaris Vecino, Cardet's wife:They badly beat up Eduardo in prison while he was handcuffed.
Eduardo Cardet Concepción was born in Holguin, Cuba on October 25, 1968. He is married to Yaimaris Vecino with two children, worked as a family doctor at the health center in the town of Velasco in Holguín province, where he lived.

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