• Submitted by: manso
• Politics and Government
• 03 / 05 / 2011

---

Published March 05, 2011.| EFE. Havana –  The Cuban Catholic Church announced Friday the release and exile to Spain of another seven political prisoners, including one of the five "Group of 75" dissidents who remain behind bars eight years after their arrest in a March 2003 crackdown.

The Havana archdiocese announced in a communique the upcoming release of Group of 75 prisoner Pedro Argüelles and seven other detainees: Lazaro Ricardo Chacon Ordoñez, Luis Caro Chavez, Antonio Rodriguez Almaguer, Agustin Cervantes Garcia, Ricardo Galvan Casal, Luis Mariano Delis Utria and Yoel Rodriguez Izquierdo.

Five of these seven prisoners appear on the list of political prisoners kept by the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation as serving sentences that go from two years to 21 years.

Up to now, 85 Cuban prisoners have accepted exile to Spain as a condition for getting out of jail, and of those, 40 are from the Group of 75.

The 64-year-old Argüelles, however, will not go to Spain, joining a small number of political detainees to be released by the government despite their refusal to accept exile as a condition of freedom.

The Cuban government committed itself last year to freeing all 52 members of the Group of 75 who were still in prison at the time, after an unprecedented dialogue with the Catholic Church supported by the Spanish government.

Cuban authorities also extended their offer of freedom to another class of prisoners convicted of crimes against national security.

Source: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/03/05/cuba-free-8-political-p...