He was the youngest of 75 persons rounded up by Cuban authorities on March 18, 2003, a day that is now commonly known as “Black Spring.” Arrested for having criticized conditions under the Fidel Castro government, he was held for seven years in various prisons, from 2003 to 2010.
Released in 2010 as a result of efforts by the Catholic Church and the government of Spain, Hernández spent several months in Madrid, where, he later said, he and his family were treating abusively by Spanish authorities, whom he accused of serving as accomplices to “the Castro brothers.” In 2011, he accepted asylum in the U.S., where he founded the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press and the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights and became a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy.
[3] On March 18, 2003, a day that would later become known as “Black Spring,” Hernández and 74 other journalists, writers, and human-rights activists were rounded up by Cuban authorities in an extensive crackdown on dissent.
Under Article 91 of Cuba's Criminal Code, Hernández was sentenced to 25 years for writing about the poor quality of government services and for criticizing the state's management of tourism, agriculture, fishing, and other industries.
[10] As his health deteriorated, the PEN American Center and other groups campaigned with increasing urgency for the release of Hernández and other “Black Spring” inmates.
[12] On August 14, 2007, Bloomberg reporter Jeremy Gerard reported that Costa Rican legislator Jose Manuel Echandi Meza, whose attempts to secure Hernández's release had previously been rebuffed by the Cuban government, had “redoubled his efforts” and was now working with an unnamed “Western European government.”[13] On September 10, 2007, Echandi Meza formally complained to the UN about the conditions under which Hernández was being held.
[16] In May, a fellow dissident, Marta Beatriz Roque, informed a reporter that Hernández's cell was “known as the ‘cell of the condemned” and that the conditions under which he was living were “subhuman.” He had no light or potable water, “and the heat is unbearable.” Also, he was being fed “two spoonfuls of rice with worms, watery meat, lentils and a rotten mass, commonly known as ‘dog vomit.’”[17] On January 8, 2009, after developing a growth on his Adam's apple, Hernández was transferred to a Havana prison hospital, Combinado del Este.
Reyes Martin told a reporter that she believed Hernández was being held, even as some other dissidents were being released, “because he insists upon his status as a political prisoner....He refuses to subjugate himself.
[22] In 2010, the committee to Protect Journalists published a short piece by Hernández about his life in prison, with “the murmurs of suffering, the plaintive screams of torture, the screeching bars, the unmistakable music of padlocks, the garrulous sentinels....the dismal silence of those petrified dungeons.
The rats, the cockroaches, the spiders...and most of all the swarm of mosquitoes that drained my blood every second of my ephemeral existence in that hell.” He described the food: “the burundanga, that main course composed, so they say, of animal guts, but which everyone knows contains skull, brain and even excrement,” and the “rotten tenca, the fish that resembled a magnet covered with pins when it was served to us.”[23] On July 10, 2010, as a result of talks between the Cuban government, the Catholic Church, and the Spanish foreign minister, Hernández and two other “Black Spring” dissidents, Dr. José Luis García Paneque and Léster Luis González Pentón, were released from prison.