HAVANA – Former political prisoner Angel Moya was released after almost two days in the custody of Cuban State Security, he told Efe.

Moya, 47, was arrested along with four other dissidents, who have also been released, on Sunday afternoon in the town of Pedro Betancourt, 173 kilometers (107 miles) east of Havana.

He said the arrests was effected “in a violent manner” when State Security officers were conducting a raid of the house of Felix Sierra, a member of the Democratic Freedom for Cuba Movement that Moya heads.

On Tuesday, Moya’s wife Berta Soler told Efe that the dissidents were in front of the residence together with another group of neighbors when State Security agents “started hitting them, shoved them into cars and took them to the police station.”

“We staged an act of being present to observe and provide moral and political support to Felix,” Moya said.

Moya said that all the arrested dissidents had been released, but Sierra was formally cautioned for allegedly possessing “subversive propaganda,” and Edelvis Granda and Dagoberto Santana, activists with the Alternative Option group, were warned for creating “public disorder.”

“They didn’t say the reason why we were arrested, but we suspect that the cause was the campaign undertaken by the Option Movement called ‘Prayer for life’ and for the supposed informative material that Felix Sierra had, (which was) to be distributed as part of the campaign,” he added.

In addition, he said that since January he had been arrested five times for several hours or a couple of days each, as occurred this time.

Moya was sentenced to 20 years in prison during the government crackdown that sent 75 dissidents to jail in the “Black Spring” of 2003, and he was finally released in 2011 on parole as part of the process of freeing political prisoners achieved with the mediation of the Cuban Catholic Church and the Spanish government. EFE