News & Events

A Cuban dissident who sewed his lips shut after doctors made fun of his hunger strike was taken to a hospital Wednesday suffering from convulsions and blackouts, an independent journalist reported.

Vladimir Alejo Miranda, 47, stopped eating 62 days ago, sewed his mouth Sept. 5 and stopped drinking water Tuesday, journalist Heriberto Liranza Romero told El Nuevo Herald by phone from Havana.

Alejo's wife, Rita Montes de Oca, joined his hunger strike and also sewed her lips Sept. 12 with regular sewing thread and a needle, the journalist said.

Alejo was taken to a hospital in the Havana municipality of Guanabacoa on Wednesday after he blacked out and went into convulsions, Liranza added. No independent confirmation was immediately available.

He was receiving intravenous fluids and could be sent home or transferred to a larger hospital depending on his condition, Liranza said. Alejo and his wife also suffer from infections around the lips.

About 15 Cubans sewed their lips together in recent memory to protest against the communist government, said Ricardo Bofill, a founder of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights now living in Miami.

``It's a kind of extreme sacrifice, very rare although it has been done on a few occasions,'' Bofill said.

Próspero Gaínza Agüero, arrested in the 2003 crackdown on 75 dissidents known as Cuba's Black Spring and sentenced to 25 years, sewed his lips for several days in 2004 to protest prison conditions.

Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta, arrested in the same roundup and sentenced to 20 years, did the same in 2008 to demand his transfer to a prison closer to his home in eastern Guantánamo province.

Both were freed and sent to Spain in recent weeks as part of a Cuban government promise in July to release 52 political prisoners, the last of the 75 still jailed. About two dozen were freed for health reasons.

Alejo, a former political prisoner, is president of the Human Rights Movement Miguel Valdés Tamayo, named after a dissident who was jailed in the 2003 crackdown, was released in 2004 because of ill health and died in 2007.

Jobless because of his political activism, Alejo went on a hunger strike to demand the right to work, the right to receive assistance from abroad and live ``like a human being, not an animal,'' Liranza said.

He's been taken to hospitals several times since he stopped eating, the journalist added, and has received about 30 bags of intravenous liquids but never before suffered convulsions.

Alejo sewed his lips together after doctors made fun of his hunger strike during one of the hospital visits, telling him that a good meal could fix whatever was ailing him, Liranza added.

``I call on the international community to raise the alarm for the condition of Vladimir Alejo Miranda and his wife,'' Liranza told the Miami-based Cuban Democratic Directorate, which supports dissidents on the island.