LA REPÚBLICA

La República pulls Yoani Sánchez’s lies to pieces:
no injuries on her body, doctors say
Cuban blogger holds she was beaten up but no evidence of the assault.

Thursday, November 19, 00:42h

Guillermo Nova | La República | La Habana

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.

Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez claims she was arrested on November 6 at 17:45 p.m. (local time) and detained for 25 minutes by a group of men in plainclothes who threw her into a car and beat her up to prevent her from attending a demonstration organized in a street right in the center of Havana.

In statements to foreign journalists, she said her attackers left her with a bruised cheekbone, a swollen eyebrow and pulled hairs, but at no time was she able to produce any physical evidence to back up her account.

The newspaper La República wanted to learn the professional opinion of the three doctors who saw her when she arrived at the teaching polyclinic “19 de Abril”, one of Cuba’s reference center, accompanied by relatives and walking with a crutch a day after the alleged assault.

General Medicine specialist Lizzie Llopis, the first to see her, proceeded to make a thorough examination in search of injuries, finding none. However, in view of the patient’s cries of pain, the doctor advised a shot of painkillers to bring faster relief, but Yoani refused, saying she would only take pills.

After repeated –and unsuccessful– attempts to find anything and given Yoani’s insistence that she was in great pain, Dr. Llopis decided to get a second opinion from any other doctor on call that evening.

She called fellow General Medicine specialist Fermín Abreu and asked him to take a look at the patient, but he could find no evidence or sign of any injuries.

Then came a third professional: Eduardo Morandeira, Deputy Director of Education in the polyclinic, who remembers that as soon as he saw Yoani he reasoned that “she’s very fair-skinned, so if she really was in a lot of pain she should have been badly bruised, but her body showed no signs of anything like that”.

When asked by La República, all three doctors agreed that Yoani Sánchez was satisfied since the beginning with the checkup method and thanked the doctors for their concern and the way she was treated.

Hearing the expert opinion somehow brought back the case of the false paralytic released in the 1980s at the behest of François Miterrand, and for which the then Cuban president Fidel Castro set only one condition: that he got on the plane climbing up the stairs on his own feet and, by miracle like with Lazarus, he arose and walked. But most of all I wonder what beef she will concoct next in her capacity as a blogger better known for her incidents than her writings.