By Ingrid Bachmann
The European Parliament awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Cuban Guillermo Fariñas, the journalist and dissident who spent more than four months on a hunger strike in an effort to pressure authorities to free political prisoners on the island, reported the Associated Press and BBC.
According to the news agency AFP, Fariñas is the third Cuban recipient of the prize. The activist Oswaldo Payá won it in 2002 and the Ladies in White, a group of women whose husbands are jailed, received it in 2005.
The award "was not for Guillermo Fariñas, but rather for the Cuban people, who for the past 50 years have been struggling to get out of this dictatorship," Fariñas said, as quoted in El Nuevo Herald.
Fariñas said that in December he intends to travel to Europe to receive the prize and he did not rule out another hunger strike if Cuban authorities don't give him permission to leave the country, explained the news agency ANSA.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
