Cuba unexpectedly released five opponents of President Fidel Castro this week, including a dissident suffering heart problems and four who were held for more than two years without trial.
Miguel Valdes Tamayo, 47, freed on Wednesday morning, was the second of 75 opponents jailed last year in a crackdown on dissents to be released on health grounds.
Authorities set free human rights activist Julio Antonio Valdes in April so that he could undergo a kidney transplant. "This took me by surprise. I did not expect to be freed," Valdes Tamayo, who was serving a 15-year term for sedition, told Reuters at his Havana home.
He said the government might be planning to release the rest of the 75 dissidents , whose one-day trials and sentences of up to 28 years prompted international condemnation and a freeze in diplomatic relations with the European Union.
Leonardo Bruzon Avila, Emilio Leyva, Lazaro Rodriguez and opposition journalist Carlos Alberto Dominguez were released on Tuesday after 27 months in prison without trial.
The four were arrested on Feb. 22, 2002, and charged with inciting public disorder for trying to hold memorial ceremonies honoring four Florida-based Cuban exiles killed when Cuban fighter jets shot down their two small planes in 1996.
"They told me to go home and stay out of trouble," Leyva, 38, said at his home. "But they have no moral authority, because they jailed me arbitrarily."
Cuba labels all dissidents as "counter-revolutionaries" on the payroll of the United States. The arrests ordered last year were the toughest crackdown in decades.