Jeff Jacoby:

AT A White House ceremony tomorrow President Bush will honor eight distinguished men and women with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award. Among the recipients will be the longtime civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks; Harper Lee, author of the much-loved novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird”; and C-SPAN’s founder and president, Brian Lamb.

One of the honorees, however, will not be there. Instead of joining the president amid the pomp and finery of the White House, Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet will spend the day locked in a fetid cell in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, where he is serving a 25-year prison sentence for speaking out against Fidel Castro’s dictatorship.

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, has written that the conditions of Biscet’s incarceration are like something out of Victor Hugo: “windowless and suffocating, with wretched sanitary conditions. The stench seeping from the pit in the ground that serves as a toilet is intensified by being compressed into an unventilated cell only as wide as a broom closet. . . . Biscet reportedly suffers from osteoarthritis, ulcers, and hypertension. His teeth, those that haven’t fallen out, are rotted and infected.”

Yeah, yeah, but Cuban health care is free and the gap between rich and poor is quite small.