Cuba: Where is the media outcry about vile prison conditions in Cuba?

In a free country, journalist Manuel Vázquez Portal wouldn't be in prison for practicing his chosen profession. In totalitarian Cuba, not only is he serving an 18-year term but he has gone on a hunger strike to protest cruel prison conditions. Concerned about his health, the Committee to Protect Journalists advocacy group rightly calls for his release.

According to Mr. Vázquez Portal's wife, Yolanda Huerga Cedeño, he started the hunger strike on April 30. That's when Mr. Vázquez Portal rejected a food package that his wife brought him on her once-every-three-months family visit. With prison rations down to tiny amounts of broth, foul-smelling soy and ground meat, he told her that the intent was to starve him and other dissident prisoners to death.

Mr. Vázquez Portal has been in solitary confinement since February in a dark, filthy, rat-infested cell, according to Ms. Huerga Cedeño. He's one of some 30 independent journalists among 75 Cuban dissidents summarily tried and condemned to lengthy prison stays for nothing more than owning a typewriter, lending books or writing about the Cuba government's dictatorship.

Caribbean journalists have no need to cast their eyes to the distant land of Iraq in order to discover prison atrocities. All they need is to look northward to the prisons of the revolutionary Fidel, the one on whom many cast approving glances.