There are 35 political prisoners in Cuba in very poor health, and authorities now have a novel way of taking dissidents out of circulation for a short time, a leading human rights group said in a report out Saturday.
Out of a total of 290 dissidents and prisoners of conscience in Cuba at the close of 2007, 35 "are in a deplorable state of health inside prisons," the National Coordinator of Current and Former Political Prisoners (CNPP) said in the report issued in Havana.
Twenty-six of the ailing inmates are women, it added.
The rights group said there were "315 known prisons (in Cuba), including 56 maximum security facilities, 182 forced-labor camps, 46 minimum security prisons, 18 juvenile detention centers and 13 prisons for women."
The report also mentioned "a new method to prevent opposition members from reaching meeting places or diplomatic missions is taking them to a police station for one or two days and then returning them … back to their home towns."