Rene Gomez Manzano
| René Gómez Manzano | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 19 December 1943 Havana, Cuba |
| Nationality | Cuban |
| Occupation | defense lawyer |
| Organization |
Corriente Agramontista Internal Dissidence Working Group Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba |
| Known for | democracy activism, 1997-2000 and 2005-2007 imprisonments |
| Awards | ABA International Human Rights Award (1997) |
René de Jesús Gómez Manzano (born 19 December 1943 in Havana) is a Cuban dissident known for his essay "The Homeland Belongs to All", which he co-wrote with Marta Beatriz Roque, Vladimiro Roca, and Felix Bonne, as well as his repeated imprisonment by the Cuban government. Amnesty International has named him to be a prisoner of conscience three times.
Gomez Manzano was born in Havana, Cuba. At the age of eleven, he was sent by his parents to study in the Appalachian Mountains region of the U.S. He then earned a scholarship to Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University, where he studied International Law. As a result of his travels, he is fluent in Spanish, Russian, English, and French. He is a Roman Catholic and an avid chess player.
A defense lawyer, he entered the dissident movement when he began to defend political prisoners in the late 1980s. He became a cofounder of Corriente Agramontista in 1990, an organization of lawyers willing to file suit against the state to force it to fulfill its own laws.
On 6 August 1994, he was arrested and detained in what Amnesty International called "an apparent round-up of known government critics and human rights activists"; the group designated him a prisoner of conscience.
For several years, Gomez Manzano was married to fellow dissident and independent journalist Ana Margarita Perdigón Brito until she decided to leave Cuba with her daughter and seek exile in the United States in 2012.
In 1997, Gomez Manzano, Marta Beatriz Roque, Vladimiro Roca, and Felix Bonne founded the Internal Dissidence Working Group. They then published a paper titled "The Homeland Belongs to All," which discussed Cuba's human rights situation and called for political and economic reforms. They also called for a boycott of elections in Cuba's one-party system and for investors to avoid Cuba, giving several news conferences to discuss their concerns.
...
Wikipedia