HAVANA, Cuba (AFP) — A leading Cuban dissident said Sunday he was detained by security police and roughed up for calling for anti-government protests in the midst of a severe economic crisis.

Manuel Cuesta Morua, president of the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba (CDTC), told AFP he was detained on Saturday for several hours and subjected to “substantial violence” for the first time in several years.

Cuba is limping through its worst crisis in recent memory, aggravated by a five-month-old US oil blockade and a slew of United States (US) sanctions that have caused foreign investors to pull out.

Fuel, food, drinking water and medicine are in short supply, and inflation has caused prices to rocket.

Cuesta Morua has been repeatedly detained for his pro-democracy activism in communist-led Cuba, but said this incident was marked by greater nervousness on the part of the state.

The CDTC said he was taken to a “deserted zone” outside the capital Havana, instead of a police station, and received death threats and “physical attacks.”

The organisation, which denounced his “arbitrary detention,” added that he was accused of “encouraging citizens to demonstrate” on July 11. That is the fifth anniversary of an unprecedented outpouring of anger over the tanking economy, which rattled the government and triggered a major crackdown.

One person died, dozens were injured and hundreds more were arrested in the biggest show of popular discontent since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

While the authorities have, under US pressure, released a number of inmates over the past year, dozens of political prisoners remain behind bars.

With anger running deeper than ever over power cuts of up to 40 hours at a time in some places, the government is on high alert for a new social explosion.

Small groups of people across the island have been taking to the streets at night to bang pots or burn huge mounds of trash that have accumulated in the absence of fuel for garbage trucks.

Seeking to end the crisis and ease US pressure for a change in Cuba’s economic model, lawmakers on Thursday adopted a package of sweeping free-market reforms aimed at boosting the private sector and attracting foreign investment.