Son of Cuban revolutionary hero Juan Almeida Bosque reportedly detained for protest

Son of Cuban revolutionary hero reported detained

HAVANA — The ailing son of one of Cuba’s revolutionary heroes has been detained by security officials after protesting that authorities won’t let him leave the country for treatment, a human rights leader on the island said Monday.

Juan Almeida Garcia, whose father fought alongside Fidel Castro during Cuba’s 1959 revolution and rose to the level of vice president before his death this year, was taken into custody Friday while on his way to a protest in central Havana, said Elizardo Sanchez, head of the independent Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

Sanchez told The Associated Press that Almeida is being held at the Villa Marista jail in the capital.

“We assume he is not going to be freed (soon) … The family has been told that they cannot visit him until Thursday,” Sanchez said.

There was no immediate comment from the government. Nobody answered calls made to Almeida’s home.

Almeida’s father, Juan Almeida Bosque, was a member of Cuba’s ruling elite, sitting on the Communist Party’s Politburo and serving as a vice president on the Council of State, the country’s supreme governing body.

When he died in September at the age of 82, he was given honors befitting his title as a “commander of the revolution,” with a ceremony at Revolution Plaza led by President Raul Castro and attended by tens of thousands of mourners.

But it has been a different story for the younger Almeida, 43, who has been arrested at least twice now for trying to leave the country for treatment for ankylosing spondylitis, a painful, progressive form of spinal arthritis.

His previous detention was brief, but Sanchez said a quick release was less likely now that his powerful father had passed away.

“He’s an orphan,” Sanchez quipped.

Almeida is not the first relative of Cuba’s ruling elite to try to leave Cuba. Fidel Castro’s daughter Alina snuck out of Cuba in 1993 using a false passport, and eventually settled in Miami, becoming a fierce critic of her father’s rule.

The younger Almeida is a lawyer who had worked for state security within the Interior Ministry in the 1990s, according to Sanchez. He was reportedly seeking to travel to the United States for treatment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

While Cubans are allowed to leave the island, they must first seek an exit visa. Doctors, scientists and other key personnel, as well as the relatives of leaders in sensitive military or political positions, are often denied permission for fear they will not return.