The European Parliament awarded its top human rights prize on Thursday to Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas, whose hunger strike this year helped pressure Havana into releasing political prisoners. Farinas, a 48-year-old psychologist, journalist and former soldier, has conducted more than 20 hunger strikes in the last two decades for various causes, including a campaign against Internet censorship.
The European Union, along with the United States, has long pressed Havana to free political prisoners, improve human rights and move towards democracy. "Farinas was ready to sacrifice and risk his own health and life as a means of pressure to achieve change in Cuba," European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek told the assembly in announcing the award.
The 27-state EU lifted diplomatic sanctions against communist-run Cuba in 2008 but continues to tie economic co-operation with the island to the plight of political prisoners. Farinas received word of the prize at his modest home in Santa Clara, Cuba, 170 miles (270 km) east of Havana, where he told Reuters it was a prize not for him, but "for the Cuban people, for the prisoners ... for our brothers who are in the streets, and the exiles."
"This prize shows that democratic and civilised governments in any part of the world, in this case the Europeans, keep their eyes on the situation of human rights in Cuba," he said. "They are sending a message of dissatisfaction with the steps the Cuban government has taken to improve the human rights situation on the island."
Havana - which considers its political prisoners to be mercenaries working for its long-time ideological foe, the United States - agreed in July to free 52 and send them to Spain, in a deal brokered by the Catholic Church. An announcement of that agreement prompted Farinas, who was said to be near death at the time, to end a 135-day hunger strike.
Cuban human rights groups say that, besides the 52, there remains around 100 people jailed in Cuba for political reasons. Under Cuba's penal code, dissidents can be arrested, tried and jailed for speaking and writing against the communist government under charges like "enemy propaganda," "clandestine printing" and "unlawful association."
The EU prize, named after late Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was first awarded in 1988. Last year, it went to Memorial, a Russian group campaigning against abuses of power.
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