Cuba's cruel prisons

Miami Herald: In a free country, journalist Manuel Vazquez Portal wouldn't be in prison for practicing his chosen profession. In totalitarian Cuba, not only is he serving an 18-year term but he has gone on a hunger strike to protest cruel prison conditions. Concerned about his health, the Committee to Protect Journalists advocacy group rightly calls for his release.
According to Vazquez Portal's wife, Yolanda Huerga Cedeno, he started the hunger strike on April 30. That's when Vazquez Portal rejected a food package that his wife brought him on her once-every-three-months family visit. With prison rations down to tiny amounts of broth, foul-smelling soy and ground meat, he told her that the intent was to starve him and other dissident prisoners to death.
Vazquez Portal has been in solitary confinement since February in a dark, filthy, rat-infested cell, according to Huerga Cedeno. He's one of 30 independent journalists among 75 Cuban dissidents summarily tried and condemned to lengthy prison stays for nothing more than owning a typewriter, lending books or writing about the Cuba government's dictatorship.
International groups and democratic governments should all press for the dissidents' release.