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Amauris Samartino Flores is a Cuban physician who escaped from his native country in 1999 in a makeshift raft. He was given asylum in Bolivia, but after becoming politically active in that country, protesting the governments of both Fidel Castro and Evo Morales, was deported. He now lives in Norway. On January 9, 2007, Samartino, a Cuban refugee who had been a resident of Bolivia since 2000, was expelled from that country after having been held for seventeen days for criticizing the Bolivian and Cuban governments. According to a report by the Human Rights Foundation (HFR), "Samartino was subjected to numerous human rights violations, including wrongful imprisonment, arbitrary detainment, forced exile, due process abuse, and undue restriction of free speech." He arrived in Colombia on the night of January 8. Thor Halvorssen, president of HRF, said: "Amauris Samartino’s case is a scandal and it reveals that the government of Bolivia will stop at nothing to silence dissent." ==History== Samartino left Cuba in 1999 in a homemade raft along with eleven other dissidents. A U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat picked him up and took him to the Guantanamo military base. He remained there for some months until the International Organization for Migration arranged asylum for him in Bolivia. He arrived in Bolivia on October 24, 2000. According to a Catholic priest, Fernando Rojas Silva, Samartino and the other dissidents were “brought to Santa Cruz by the U.S. Embassy, given a few dollars for their survival and a paper certifying that the Bolivian government would provide the paperwork necessary to remain in the country. Months passed and nothing happened. They ran out of dollars and moved to the capital,” where they began “knocking on doors of official institutions and the Embassy.” Finally, in desperation, they held “a hunger strike...outside the U.S. Embassy,” whereupon “the representative of UNHCR requested the intervention of mediators.” Eventually Samartino was certified as a political refugee in Bolivia, and later he became a permanent legal resident. It was in Santa Cruz that he met his wife, Normina Chávez, and, according to the British medical journal The Lancet, “worked as a supervisor in natural gas operations.”〔〔〔 Samartino became politically active “after Evo Morales, a socialist and a close ideological ally of both Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Cuba's President Fidel Castro, was elected Bolivia's president in 2005 and Cuban doctors began arriving. Samartino said he feared Bolivia was going to be turned into a second Cuba so he began speaking out in the media about the Communist island's human rights violations and helping Cuban medics who wanted to defect.” The Lancet paraphrased Samartino as saying that “Cuba's overseas medical programme is more political than humanitarian,” and as noting that “Cuba has sent many more medical personnel to oil-rich Venezuela, ruled by a close ally, than to Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest nation, and which is wracked by an AIDS epidemic.”〔 In 2006, Samartino spoke out in the Bolivian media against violations of human rights by the Cuban regime and lamented Castro's influence on Morales. In July of that year, according to HRF, Samartino “announced that he had assisted thirty dissident Cuban doctors, who were visiting Bolivia in a cooperative exchange program, in defecting to Brazil and to the United States.”〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Amauris Samartino Flores」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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