Angel Moya Acosta | |
---|---|
Born | |
Occupation | construction worker |
Organization | Alternative Option Movement |
Known for | imprisonment, democracy activism |
Spouse | Berta Soler |
Children | Luis Angel and Lienys |
Angel Moya Acosta (born 20 September 1964) is a Cuban construction worker and the founder of the Alternative Option Movement. [1]
Moya fought for one-and-a-half years in the Cuban intervention in Angola in the late 1980s. [2] In the following decade, Moya was arrested several times for his activism. In December 1997, he was arrested on his way to join a public memorial, and in November 1999 he was arrested for participating in a prayer session for dissident Oscar Biscet. On 15 December 1999, he was arrested and imprisoned after a demonstration along with fellow Alternative Option Movement members Guido and Ariel Sigler Amaya; the latter arrest caused Amnesty International to designate him a prisoner of conscience. [3] In 2000, he was arrested and imprisoned for a year for "disrespect" after commemorating the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. [4]
He was again imprisoned during the Black Spring in 2003, and sentenced to 20 years in jail.[ clarification needed ] His wife Berta Soler, now leader of the Ladies in White movement, [5] campaigned on his behalf. [6]
When Moya suffered a herniated disc in October 2004, Soler began a campaign to urge the government to give him an operation, submitting a letter to President Fidel Castro on his behalf and staging a rare protest in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución with the Ladies in White. [6] [7] She described the protest as "my right and duty as a wife". After two days of protest, Moya was given surgery. [8]
After Moya's early release from prison in 2011, he and Soler chose to remain in Cuba and continue their calls for the release of political prisoners, despite being offered emigration to Spain. [9]
In March 2012, Soler and Moya were detained along with three dozen other demonstrators when they staged their weekly protest ahead of a visit of Pope Benedict XVI. Soler told reporters that authorities had warned the Ladies to avoid Benedict's public appearances, including masses. [5]
Soler is a microbiology technician at a Havana hospital. [10] Moya and Soler have two sons, Luis Angel and Lienys. [2]
The Varela Project is a project that was started in 1998 by Oswaldo Payá of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL) and named after Felix Varela, a Cuban religious leader.
Huang Qi is a Chinese webmaster and human rights activist from Sichuan. He is the co-founder of Tianwang Center for Missing Persons, along with his wife Zeng Li. Initially the mission of the organization was to help counter human trafficking that had become a swelling problem in the late 1990s, but later it was expanded to include campaign against human rights abuse. Huang is also the owner and webmaster of 64tianwang.com, a website originally intended to release news about people who had disappeared in the People's Republic of China.
Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas was a Cuban political activist. A Roman Catholic, he founded the Christian Liberation Movement in 1987 to oppose the one-party rule of the Cuban Communist Party. He attracted international attention for organizing a petition drive known as the Varela Project, in which 25,000 signatories petitioned the Cuban government to guarantee freedom of speech and freedom of assembly as well as to institute a multi-party democracy. In recognition of his work, he received the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize and People in Need's Homo Homini Award.
The Cuban dissident movement is a political movement in Cuba whose aim is to replace the current government with a liberal democracy. According to Human Rights Watch, the Marxist-Leninist Cuban government represses nearly all forms of political dissent.
Óscar Manuel Espinosa Chepe was a Cuban economist and dissident. He was one of approximately 75 dissidents arrested, tried and convicted in 2003 as part of a crackdown by the Cuban government nicknamed the "Black Spring". He was given a twenty-year sentence on a charge of "activities against the integrity and sovereignty of the State", causing Amnesty International to declare him as a prisoner of conscience.
Ladies in White is an opposition movement in Cuba founded in 2003 by wives and other female relatives of jailed dissidents and those who have been made to disappear by the government. The women protest the imprisonments by attending Mass each Sunday wearing white dresses and then silently walking through the streets dressed in white clothing. The color white is chosen to symbolize peace.
Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello is a Cuban political dissident. She is an economist by training and the founder and director of the Cuban Institute of Independent Economists. Agence France-Presse described her in 2007 as Cuba's "leading woman dissident".
Guillermo Fariñas Hernández is a Cuban doctor of psychology, independent journalist and political dissident in Cuba. He has conducted 23 hunger strikes over the years to protest various elements of the Cuban government and spent more than 11 years in prison. He vowed that he would die in the struggle against censorship in Cuba.
Black Spring was the 2003 crackdown by the Cuban Government on Cuban dissidents. The government imprisoned 75 dissidents, including 29 journalists on the basis that they were acting as agents of the United States by accepting funds from the US government and George W. Bush's administration at the time. Amnesty International described the 75 Cubans as "prisoners of conscience". The Cuban government stated at the time: "the 75 individuals arrested, tried and sentenced in March/April 2003... are demonstrably not independent thinkers, writers or human rights activists, but persons directly in the pay of the US government. [...] [T]hose who were arrested and tried were charged not with criticizing the [Cuban] government, but for receiving American government funds and collaborating with U.S. diplomats".
Manuel Vázquez Portal is a Cuban poet, writer and journalist known for his 2003 imprisonment.
Héctor Fernando Maseda Gutiérrez is a Cuban nuclear engineer and a journalist.
Blas Giraldo Reyes Rodríguez is a Cuban librarian and a member of Varela project. He was imprisoned in 2003 during a crackdown on dissidents and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Amnesty International has declared him as a prisoner of conscience.
Luis Milán Fernández is a Cuban physician from Santiago de Cuba. In 2001, he and his wife, a dentist named Lisandra Lafitta Hernández, signed "Manifiesto 2001", which called for basic freedoms to be respected in Cuba.
Orlando Zapata Tamayo was a Cuban political activist and a political prisoner who died after hunger striking for more than 80 days. His death received international attention, and was viewed as a significant setback in Cuba's relationship with the U.S. the EU and the rest of the world.
Jesús Joel Díaz Hernández is a Cuban journalist who was imprisoned by the Cuban government from 1999–2001. His imprisonment attracted protest from several human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, which named him a prisoner of conscience.
Ivonne Malleza Galano is a Cuban democracy activist who was imprisoned in 2011 by the Cuban government. Amnesty International designated her a prisoner of conscience.
Félix Navarro Rodríguez is a Cuban farmer, teacher, and dissident from Perico, Matanzas Province.
René de Jesús Gómez Manzano is a Cuban dissident known for his essay "The Homeland Belongs to All", which he co-wrote with Marta Beatriz Roque, Vladimiro Roca, and Felix Bonne, as well as his repeated imprisonment by the Cuban government. Amnesty International has named him to be a prisoner of conscience three times.
Berta de los Angeles Soler Fernandez is a Cuban dissident. She is the current leader of Ladies in White, a group originally composed of wives and female relatives of political prisoners who protested on their behalf which has since 2011 transformed into a more general human rights group open to Cuban women. She assumed leadership following the death of group founder Laura Pollan. In 2012, the Associated Press described her as "one of Cuba's leading dissidents".
José Daniel Ferrer García is a Cuban human rights activist, whom the international and Spanish media claim to be "the visible head of the dissident movement in the interior of the island since the death of Oswaldo Payá, in July 2012”.