Santa Clara, Cuba March 3, 1998.- The Cuban Reflection Movement, opposition organization to the Castro regime with a central office in the province of Villa Clara, Cuba, has issued a communique of support for the members of the Pro Human Rights Party, afiliated with the Andrei Sahkarov Foundation, who have declared themselves on hunger strike in this city to protest the repressive measures taken by the regime against them for having held an act in remembrance of the four members of Brothers to the Rescue murdered on February 24, 1996. The document, read from Cuba by Librado Linares García, General Secretary of the Cuban Reflection Movement, condemned, "emphatically this abominable proceeding of the ruling government in Cuba," what it signifies, and "holds absolutely responsible for the lives that they are slowly extinguishing."
The declaration also affirms that "the dictatorial government in Havana is accustomed to repressing the non-violent opposition and these brothers decided to react as a group, with much valour and perserverence, and at the cost of going and ending their lives." The hunger strikers maintained a prolonged fast demanding that false criminal charges drawn up against them be withdrawn. They ended the fast after receiving the verbal response via funtionaries of the regime that the charges against the 10 activists implicated in the case would be dropped in exchange for the 6 who had maintained the fast leave the country.
The decision to renew the protest, this time in the form of a hunger strike, was taken after they had been repressed for honoring the memory of the martyrs of Brothers to the Rescue, being sent to different prisons and in one of them,José Antonio Alvarado Almeida, to a local psychiatric hospital. The Cuban Revolutionary Democratic Directorate, as representatives in the exterior of the Cuban Reflection Movement, echoes this request, " to personalities, institutions, and responsible and just governments, so that they intercede, persuade or pressure, in the last case, the Cuban leadership so that they place Daula Carpio Matas, Iván Lema Romero, José Manuel Yera Benítez, Vicente García Ramos, José Antonio Alvarado Almeida, Lilian Meneces Martínez, Ileana Peñalver Duque, as well as the rest of the members of case #2039 of 97, and that no reprisals be taken against the attorney Guillermo Fariñas Hernández, another petitioning hunger striker.