Uncle Fidel better dust off the couch.
Cuban journalist tells CPJ of physical and psychological torture***Arévalo Padrón was released from the Ariza maximum-security prison, in the central province of Cienfuegos, on November 13. The journalist said he had been physically and psychologically tortured while in jail. In April 1998, he said that two prison officers severely beat him in the face and back after he refused to chant pro-government slogans. Arévalo Padrón was then punished and placed in a small cell where he did not receive immediate medical attention. "There I stayed for one year and two months," the journalist said. As a result of the beating, his nasal septum was broken, and he can breathe only through his left nostril, he said.
Jailed for showing "disrespect" to Castro Arévalo Padrón, founder of the Línea Sur Press news agency, was sentenced in October 1997 to six years in prison for showing "disrespect" to President Fidel Castro Ruz and Cuban State Council member Carlos Lage. The charges stemmed from a series of interviews Arévalo Padrón gave in 1997 to Miami-based radio stations in which he alleged that while Cuban farmers starved, helicopters were taking fresh meat from the countryside to the dinner tables of President Castro, Lage, and other Communist Party officials. ***
November 1, 2003 Cuban President Fidel Castro criticized "US impreialism" in Iraq in a five-hour address to an academic conference on "The New World Hegemony(AFP/File/Rajesh Jantilal)