For almost a week, I have been haunted by Cuban political prisoner Ariel Sigler Amaya’s description of what the Castro dictatorship is doing to him as he sits in a Havana hospital suffering from a litany of health problems.
“This is obvious,” said Sigler, “they are killing me little by little.”
And nobody, except the relative few of us who follow and care about the plights of Sigler and other Cuban political prisoners, gives a damn.
The MSM is not tracking the steep decline of his health.
There is no demand from the United States or Europe that Sigler be released to get the medical care he needs.
You won’t find Sigler’s photo on T-shirts and posters, and protesters are not being arrested outside the Cuban Interests Section in Washington or the dictatorship’s outpost at the United Nations in New York.
Ariel Sigler is no Nelson Mandela.
Instead, we hear more about how the United States is wrong, about how the United States, despite the lack of anything more than superficial change by the raulista regime, must lift its so-called “embargo,” as if the United States, and not the butchers in charge in Havana for 50 years, are responsible for the sufferings of Sigler and 11 million other Cubans.
Once again, it’s all about us, we poor, poor Americans and how our rights being violated.
We don’t have a clue what Sigler is going through, and how all of his rights – including his supposed right to partake of the so-called Cuban health care “miracle – are being trampled by his captors.
Hell, many, whether because of their ignorance or their politics, cannot fully comprehend that he and other Cuban prisoners of conscience are in jail because they chose to live as free men and exercise their basic human rights to speak freely, to act freely, to organize, to demand and work for a better life for themselves but more importantly for their fellow Cubans.
Nobody, except the few of us motivated by our blood as Cubans and/or our consciences as free men and women, gives a damn.
I have tossed and turned, and cried tears wondering and praying about what more I can do. I have posted numerous updates and condemnations about Sigler’s declining health, and it only gets worse.
The Cuban doctors, whether by their benign incompetence or malignant neglect, have done him no good. The hospital is overrun with cockroaches, and the food and water are deplorable.
Sigler suffers terrible pain in his abdomen and elsewhere in his body. A throat infection refuses to heal. His legs are paralyzed. And most ominously, he continues to lose weight – he’s now down to less than 120 pounds, almost half of what he weighed when he was imprisoned in March 2003.
And most frustratingly, nobody, except those of us who recognize what truly is at stake in Sigler’s hospital room and elsewhere in the Castro gulag, gives a damn.
I am committed to telling Sigler’s story, however long it takes.
Whether it’s to finally use what little influence and/or power of persuasion I might possess to help Sigler win his release, or at least better medical care by his captors.
Or to complete the story of how the butchers of Havana finally completed the task Sigler warned about:
“They are killing me little by little.”
The question remains:
Who gives a damn?
Please, don’t be a nobody.
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