Spain confirms asylum offer to Cuban hunger strike

Guillermo Farinas has been on hunger strike for almost two weeks to demand Havana free 26 political prisoners needing medical care.

MADRID, March 9, 2010 (AFP) - Spain confirmed Tuesday that it had offered asylum to a dissident Cuban journalist who is on a hunger strike and that the offer was rejected.

Guillermo Farinas has been on hunger strike for almost two weeks to demand Havana free 26 political prisoners needing medical care.

Spanish embassy staff in Cuba visited Farinas "several times and informed him of this possibility (of asylum), that he abandon his hunger strike and become an exile in Spain, which he refused," a foreign ministry spokeswoman told AFP.

Farinas told AFP on Monday that he had rebuffed an offer of asylum from Spain and that he told Spanish ambassador Carlos Perez-Desoy that "the invitation should be extended to the 26" detainees seeking medical care.

The 48-year-old launched his protest following the death on February 23 of leading Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo, 42, at a Havana hospital on the 85th day of a hunger strike.

Zapata had been refusing food in protest at jail conditions. His death marked the first time in nearly 40 years a Cuban activist starved himself to death to protest government abuses.

Farinas, a psychologist by training, became so frustrated with living conditions in the Americas' only one-party Communist regime that in 2004 he began working for Cubanacan Press, a small dissident news agency.

He has gone on hunger strike 20 times and has been jailed three times for his opposition to the Cuban regime.

The Communist Party newspaper Granma, the mouthpiece of the Cuban leadership, weighed in Monday for the first time on Farinas's refusal to take food or water, accusing him of being an agent of US and European interests.