Cuban academic and political opponent Manuel Cuesta Morúa received the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award 2016 at the Wilson Center, a research center in Washington DC, in recognition for his democratic ideas. 

The award recognizes Cuesta Morúa's "extensive work on democratic reforms in Cuba" and grants him a one-month scholarship at the center to work with Washington's academic and policy-making communities.

The award winner, who has been detained on multiple occasions for defending human rights and organizing opposition meetings in Havana, currently coordinates the Citizen Platform Plataforma Nuevo País ( #Other18 ) to seek electoral reforms in Cuba, and belongs to the Round Table of Unit for Action Democratic, a coalition of organizations and personalities from Cuba and abroad.

"The change of policy of the United States to Cuba seems to me very important, for the difference that now exists between a government that sleeps peacefully and a government that does not sleep," said the Cuban opponent a week before, in a forum at the Wilson Center. 

Winners of previous editions include Myanmar politician and activist Aung San Suu Kyi, journalist and Ukrainian politician Mustafa Nayyem, and Mexican academic and human rights activist Sergio Aguayo Quezada.

As reported in 14yMedio and news website TERRA.