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The prominent Cuban dissident José Daniel Ferrer has been freed from prison and put on a plane to the US where he will live in exile with his family, the communist country’s foreign ministry has said.
Ferrer, who has been imprisoned repeatedly as the long-term leader of the island’s pro-democracy movement, announced this month he had opted for exile after facing “torture” and “humiliation” behind bars.
In a letter from prison, the 55-year-old said that since he was re-imprisoned in April after being briefly freed under a deal with the former US president Joe Biden, “the cruelty of the dictatorship towards me has known no bounds”.
He cited “blows, torture, humiliation, threats and extreme conditions” in prison, including “the theft of food and hygiene products ordered by the regime’s minions”.
Ferrer said he took the decision to leave given threats that his wife would also be imprisoned and his young son sent to an institution for juvenile offenders.
The foreign ministry in Havana said in a statement that Ferrer and members of his family left the country for the US on Monday after “a formal request from that country’s government and the express acceptance” of the dissident.
His sister Ana Belkis Ferrer told AFP by telephone that the opposition leader had “finally been exiled, thank God,” adding his family was “very happy despite the tension of the last days”.
Ferrer said in his letter he would leave Cuba “with my dignity and honour intact, and not for long”.
His departure deals a blow to the opposition movement in Cuba, in the throes of its worst economic crisis in decades and a mass exodus of young people, mainly to the US.
Ferrer, the founder of the Patriotic Union of Cuba – one of the most active opposition organisations in the one-party state – had for years resisted pressure to go into exile to avoid prison.
He was the most high-profile of a group of prisoners released in January under a landmark deal struck with Biden in exchange for Washington removing Cuba from a list of terrorism sponsors.
But he was sent back to prison in April after Biden’s successor, Donald Trump, placed Cuba back on the list.
Ferrer has been in and out of prison since March 2003, when he and 74 other opposition members were arrested in a three-day period of repression known as Cuba’s “black spring”.
He was released in 2011 but sent back to prison in 2021 after a crackdown on rare anti-government street protests that rattled the communist authorities. The repression that followed silenced many critical voices and left the opposition in disarray.
During his brief spell of freedom this year, Ferrer had defied the authorities by criticising Cuba’s leadership on social media.
He also met the head of the US diplomatic mission in Cuba, Mike Hammer, at his home in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba.
In his letter, he said “only the United States … truly stands in solidarity with the peaceful opposition and the Cuban people” – an implicit rebuke of the EU, which has angered dissidents by maintaining a political and cooperation agreement with Cuba.
Ferrer was transferred directly from the prison of Mar Verde in Cuba’s south to the international airport of Santiago de Cuba, where he was met by his wife Nelva Ortega and their son José Daniel , two daughters and his ex-wife – all of whom will travel with him to Miami.
