Cuban police detain dissident known as Antunez and his wife

Posted on Thursday, 02.06.14

Cuban police detain dissident known as Antunez and his wife
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
JTAMAYO@ELNUEVOHERALD.COM

Cuban police and State Security agents Wednesday detained a top
dissident — Jorge Luis García Pérez who is also known as "Antúnez" — and
his wife and seized computers, clothes, a TV, and even cooking pots
during a raid of their home, other democracy activists reported.

García Pérez has been organizing an island-wide opposition movement
since he and his wife, Yris Pérez, returned in December from a
four-month trip abroad that took them to Miami, Washington, and several
European countries.

Dissident and neighbor Blas Fortún Martínez told the Miami-based Cuban
Democratic Directorate that García Pérez was hauled away by police and
State Security agents after a raid Wednesday morning on his home in
Placetas, a town in central Cuba.

More than 15 police cars and trucks and even a fire truck turned up for
the raid as police painted over the anti-Castro slogans on the front of
their house, Fortún reported.

Dissident Loreto Hernández told the Directorate that he and Donaida
Pérez were also being arrested before the call went dead. Hernández
later reported that he had been freed but that there's no word on García
Pérez's whereabouts.

Yris Pérez was away from the home during the raid but was arrested later
along with five other dissidents in the provincial capital, Santa Clara,
as she left the home of a government opponent there, said dissident
Damaris Moya.

Moya said she witnessed police punching Pérez and roughly throwing her
and the five others into police cruisers when the activists tried to
walk to the State Security offices in Santa Clara to demand García
Pérez's release.

Cuban authorities usually detain dissidents for a few hours or more to
keep them from attending planned opposition activities. But the
Directorate's Janisset Rivero said she did not believe that García Pérez
would be released soon.

Police may hold him longer to try to disrupt his island-wide campaign to
organize the opposition to the government, Rivero said, or to keep him
from attending a U.N. gathering on human rights in Switzerland this month.

Dissident Manuel Cuesta Morua was held for five days in January and then
charged with "disseminating false news against world peace." He is not
expected to be brought to trial but must report to police every Tuesday
and cannot travel abroad.

García Pérez, secretary general of the opposition Orlando Zapata Tamayo
National Front for Civic Resistance, called for efforts to "destabilize"
the Raúl Castro government in a news conference the day before his
return to Cuba.

Source: Cuban police detain dissident known as Antunez and his wife -
Cuba - MiamiHerald.com -
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/06/3915092/cuban-police-detain-dissident.html