HAVANA: A prominent Cuban dissident vowed Thursday she will continue her hunger strike against political repression in Cuba despite fellow protesters' fears that the fast is putting her life at risk.
"This morning, she is in a very precarious state, she could barely talk. We are afraid for her life, which is in serious danger," said Idania Yanes, a militant fasting alongside Marta Beatriz Roque, the 67-year-old "Iron Lady" of Cuba's opposition.
"Yes," Roque responded weakly, when asked by AFP whether she intended to continue her fast.
"I can't talk, I don't want to talk, talk with Idania," the dissident murmured, stretched out with her eyes closed in the bedroom of her small Havana apartment.
Roque, who is diabetic, began fasting at noon Monday to protest what she said was the government's "intolerable and untenable" treatment of political opponents.
On Wednesday, she suffered from hypoglycemia and had survived a cardiac arrest, said Yanes, who is the president of the Central Opposition Coalition, an outlawed group operating in central Cuba.
"An opposition nurse had to resuscitate her. She lost consciousness for two minutes, with a fever," Yanes explained.
Several dissidents in Cuba and abroad have sent messages to ask Roque to end her fast, but "Marta persists in her commitment, believing that, one way or another, it is necessary to end the repression that strikes against opposition in Cuba," she added.
Across the country, a total of 26 people were participating in the hunger strike that also is aimed at obtaining the release of Jorge Vazquez Chiavano, a dissident who was supposed to have been freed at the start of September.
The Cuban government claims that dissidents are "mercenaries" working for the US government.
An economist and former university professor who began her opposition activity in 1989, Roque was the only woman among 75 activists arrested and given long prison sentences in a high-profile 2003 crackdown. She was released in 2004 for health reasons.
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