MIAMI — A Cuban dissident who sewed his lips shut after doctors made fun of his hunger strike was taken to a hospital Wednesday suffering from convulsions and blackouts, an independent journalist reported.
Vladimir Alejo Miranda, 47, stopped eating 62 days ago, sewed his mouth Sept. 5 and stopped drinking water Tuesday, journalist Heriberto Liranza Romero told El Nuevo Herald by phone from Havana.
Alejo’s wife, Rita Montes de Oca, joined his hunger strike and also sewed her lips Sept. 12 with regular sewing thread and a needle, the journalist said.
Alejo was taken to a hospital in the Havana municipality of Guanabacoa on Wednesday after he blacked out and went into convulsions, Liranza added. No independent confirmation was immediately available.
He was receiving intravenous fluids and could be sent home or transferred to a larger hospital depending on his condition, Liranza said. Alejo and his wife also suffer from infections around the lips.
“It’s a kind of extreme sacrifice, very rare, although it has been done on a few occasions,” Ricardo Bofill, a founder of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, said of sewing one’s lips together. About 15 Cubans in recent memory have taken the action to protest against the communist government, said Bofill, who now lives in Miami.
Alejo, a former political prisoner, is president of the Human Rights Movement Miguel Valdes Tamayo, named after a dissident who was jailed in a 2003 crackdown, was released in 2004 because of ill health and died in 2007.
Jobless because of his political activism, Alejo went on a hunger strike to demand the right to work, the right to receive assistance from abroad and live “like a human being, not an animal,” Liranza said.
He has been taken to hospitals several times since he stopped eating, the journalist said, but never before suffered convulsions.
Alejo sewed his lips together after doctors made fun of his hunger strike during one of the hospital visits, telling him that a good meal could fix whatever was ailing him, Liranza added.
