DPA/Strasbourg


Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas collected the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought yesterday after being allowed to travel for the first time - three years after he was granted the award.
The empty chair that had represented Farinas at the 2010 award ceremony “served as a grim reminder that in my country the absence of human rights continues to be the most urgent social need,” the dissident said in his acceptance speech.
Farinas said it was the “growing civic defiance of Cubans” that had enabled him to collect the prize now, rather than a fundamental change in the political situation. The regime in Havana had been forced to “change something so that nothing changes,” he added.
In October, Cuban President Raul Castro announced that citizens would be allowed to travel abroad without first obtaining exit permits. But Farinas said the privilege was not available to everybody.
“Not all Cubans can leave the country freely today, but all Cubans continue to be subjected to the arbitrary nature of a government that considers the universal declaration of human rights as enemy propaganda,” he said.
“Dawn is breaking in Cuba now,” Farinas said of the political struggle he was engaged in. “We have risked our lives for this cause and we will not hesitate to do that again.
“What is at stake here ... is not just a political or economic equation but the basic foundation of life and human co-existence, namely freedom,” Farinas told the parliament in the French city of Strasbourg, where he was accompanied by his mother.
Farinas’ powerful convictions and political activities had led to more than 11 years in prison and 23 hunger strikes, according to parliamentary vice president Gianni Pittella. “Your courage almost cost you your life,” Pittella said.
The European Union and its parliament would “stand by the Cuban people and their aspirations for democracy,” Pittella added.
The Sakharov Prize has been awarded to Cubans on two previous occasions, to the late dissident leader Oswaldo Paya in 2002 and the Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White) protest group, who collected their 2005 prize in April.
The award, named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, has been handed out by the parliament since 1988. Its first recipient was South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.