Vladimiro Roca Antúnez (born December 21, 1942, in Havana) is a Cuban dissident and leader of the illegal Cuban Social-Democratic Party.
Roca is the son of Blas Roca Calderio, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Cuba. In 1961, at the age of 18, he was among the first batch of a young elite selected for training as fighter pilots in the Soviet Union.[1] He served for ten years in the Cuban Armed Forces, and subsequently worked as an economist for the government. He became an active dissident in 1991, four years after his father's death. Roca and his father were close, though the son never had the same enthusiasm for Fidel Castro's 1959 socialist revolution.[2]
Roca was expelled from his state job working with foreign investment.[3] In August 1996, he linked up with three other Cuban professionals who favored change, economist Marta Beatriz Roque, engineer Félix Bonne Carcassés and attorney René Gómez Manzano to form the Working Group for Internal Dissidence.[4] In 1997 they issued the document "The Homeland Belongs to Us All",[5] in which they defended human rights, called for an end to political discrimination,[6] and criticized a draft document issued by the Communist Party before its national congress that year for distorting history and offering no pragmatic proposals for tackling the country's economic ills.[3] Two weeks later, on July 16, 1997, the four were arrested. In March 1998 they were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three-and-a-half to five years on charges of sedition.[4]
Roque, Bonne and Gómez were released in May 2000,[4] but although Roca appeared also to meet the criteria for early release, he was instead subjected to four years of solitary confinement, incarceration in a remote prison far from his family, greatly restricted family visits, and virtually no medical care for his high blood pressure. It would appear that Roca was singled out for particularly severe treatment because he had been a member of the Cuban Communist Party and his father had been one of its founding members.[6]
Roca entered prison an atheist, but was baptised Roman Catholic on September 24, 1999. He credited his new faith with helping him endure imprisonment.[3]
He was finally released from prison on May 6, 2002, 70 days before his five-year-sentence would have expired.[6]
In 2002, he won the Civil Courage Prize, which recognizes "steadfast resistance to evil at great personal risk — rather than military valor."[7]
He is married to Magaly de Armas, and they have a son and a daughter.[2]
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