Cuban Sentenced to Prison For Demanding Food Before TV Camer

[HURAKAN]

Cuban Man Sentenced to Prison For Demanding Food Before TV Cameras Released

HAVANA – The Cuban government on Thursday released Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos, alias “Panfilo,” from prison after he was sentenced to two years behind bars for drunkenly denouncing food shortages on the communist-ruled island before television cameras.

Elizardo Sanchez, the president of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, or CCDHRN, which adopted the 48-year-old Panfilo as a prisoner of conscience, said that the man was released from prison and sent to a psychiatrist to be treated for alcoholism.

“It’s an intelligent and rational decision on the part of the Cuban government,” said the CCDHRN in a communique, and Sanchez said he felt that it had occurred due to pressure from international public opinion.

Despite the fact that Panfilo was sentenced to two years behind bars for being a “social danger” and the upholding of his sentence in a Havana appeals court last week, on Thursday he received a letter in which he was told of his imminent release and then sent for a 21-day stay in a psychiatric hospital.

Panfilo, who read the letter to Sanchez by telephone, will remain free after he is released from the hospital and will not have to return to prison.

The two-year sentence could not be appealed and Panfilo was to have spent his two years behind bars in the Toledo 2 prison, located on the outskirts of Havana.

The incident for which he was convicted occurred in July, when an evidently intoxicated Panfilo interrupted the taping of a documentary on urban music in Cuba and shouted: “There’s tremendous hunger here. What we need is ‘jama’ (a Cuban slang word for food).”

His outburst might have passed unnoticed if someone had not posted the images on YouTube, where more than 400,000 people viewed them, and from that point forward support groups began to spring up for Panfilo.

Upon seeing the commotion his remarks had caused, Panfilo retracted them in a later video in which he asserted: “I didn’t know who filmed me, and I didn’t do it with any aim” in mind, but that did not stop authorities from arresting him and putting him on trial on Aug. 12 in a closed-door hearing.

His defense attorney emphasized before the appeals court that his client was suffering from alcoholism and therefore asked that he be placed in an institution for rehabilitation, but his arguments did not find favor with the court at that time.

But Panfilo’s conviction created a sizable stir in the media and elsewhere “and it was international public opinion that managed to save him from this tropical gulag,” Sanchez told Efe.

The “good news, an unusual and unprecedented act,” should not obscure the situation of the thousands of people who are imprisoned in Cuba for constituting a “social danger,” Sanchez said, asserting that between 3,000 and 5,000 people are currently behind bars for that offense, although he said that they are “technically innocent because they have not committed crimes.”

Among those prisoners are prostitutes, beggars, musicians who have delivered radical messages and black market vendors. EFE

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The original video:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLLAh2yTqu0[/youtube]

[somethingfunny]

Of course, anyone who would criticize the government MUST be clinically insane.

[artist]

wish I could understand spanish!