• Submitted by: manso
• Politics and Government
• 03 / 12 / 2011

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Cuba’s government Friday freed Oscar Elias Biscet, a leading  dissident who served more than 11 years in prison and was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The 49-year-old doctor was serving a 25-year prison sentence for “acts against the sovereignty and independence of the national territory” under the notorious Law 88 of 1999.

Biscet told Agence France-Presse that three state security agents had delivered him to his home in the Lawton neighborhood of Havana and to his wife, Elsa Morejón.

Biscet was sentenced to three years in prison in 1999 on charges of public disorder for staging a peaceful march through Havana days before an Ibero-American summit of heads of state and government from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries.

Biscet served the full three years in a high-security prison in the eastern city of Holguín and was released in November 2002.

Barely 37 days later, he was arrested again and was tried in April 2003 with the 74 other dissidents rounded up during Cuba’s so-called “Black Spring.”

Source: /miamiherald.typepad.com/cuban_colada/2011/03/