Recently in Havana it was announced that foreign and domestic journalists would visit “some prisons.” Something is being plotted or planned those in power on the island.
It’s normal that the regime’s spokesmen defend the indefensible, this is what they live for; having wedded themselves to the lie, it is impossible to divorce her. If the Nomenklatura of power ordered them to say it, all is well, they say: everything is perfect.
The incredible thing about the news or the government farce is that foreign agencies join in on the lie.
Could EFE or another foreign agency EFE freely visit Castro’s prisons? Or interview a prisoner chosen randomly?
The worst thing about this theatrical work is that it insults the intelligence and the pain of a people; I dare to predict that over 50% of Cuban families have had a family member arrested and I am being cautious with the figure; each affected family knows the inhuman conditions of Cuban prisons.
The beatings, overcrowding, lack of medical care, self-harm to demand rights, violence, the company of rodents and insects in the cells, the prisoners’ lack of rights of and the jailers’ impunity are the stark reality of what the Cuban military wants to hide. Now with the support of foreign news agencies and the complicity of the national press.
In a survey we did in early 2010 of the political prisoners in Canaletas Prison in Ciego de Avila, 85% of inmates were repeat offenders in prison and a great number assured that the penitentiary was a university for criminal behavior.
To talk about food in Cuban prisons is synonymous with pain. God and the criminals know the food eaten in these places and the amount is so ephemeral that most prisoners are weakened.
Health care is a topic for another paper, but to cite just one example, Alfredo Felipe Fuentes, a former political prisoner of the Group of 75, was always told by the doctors that he was fine despite his ailments; when he was finally exiled abroad he was diagnosed with cancer. I should note that to destroy the political prisoners is a goal in each prison carried out in cahoots with the political police.
Today I read on the skewed news about Cuban prison system, and I remember with sadness the day Reineiro Diaz Betancourt told a common inmate 19 years old, who had committed a minor indiscipline in Cell Block 43 Detachment 3: “Today we can not beat you up because they’re going to accuse at the United Nations of being counterrevolutionaries.” I looked at him and said. “Guard, you should be ashamed of your words, to be an abuser is an option but not the only option.”
12 April 2013
