While throughout many parts of the world many tributes were being held for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Cuba once again opted to go against it. They began on Thursday the 9th with beatings, mob acts, and harassment towards the Ladies in White, who were carrying out their usual march throughout the capital.
All throughout the country there were arrests, blocking of telephone service, and police harassment towards activists. The first piece of bad news came to me in text message from Rolando Rodriguez Lobaina at 7 am on Friday. He and his brother, Nestor, were detained at that time. They left Rolando in the Parque 24 barracks in Guantanamo, and Nestor was taken to the center of police operations. Later, the government cracked down on Enyor Diaz Allen, Isael Poveda Silva, Jorge Corrales Ceballos, Jose Cano Fuentes, and other activists.
From Santiago de Cuba I received word that Idalmis Nunez and Tania Montoya had not been detained in the capital city, which they traveled to in order to support the Ladies in White. However, they did suffer from much harassment, collective repression, and overall harsh treatment carried out by trained mobs.
Later on I received a message from Moa: Omar Wilson Estevez, Angis Sarrion Romero, and three other activists (whose names I could not decipher due to the strange sounds emanating from the phone line) had all been detained. In Velazco, a small town near Gibara, there was also a repressive wave. They detained Jonas Avila and Rafael Leiva.
Bayamo reported the detention of Yoandris Montoya Aviles and another young man by the name of Ariel. I still do not have the names of the detainees in Banes and Antilla, and they also have not been able to explain to me why Nestor was kept in the G2 offices until Sunday, the 12th, when he was taken to the Provincial Prison of Guantanamo without a single trial or formal accusation.
I did not even try to travel out of San German. I am well aware of the vigilance and control methods exercised over my family and me. I also know which individuals are responsible for this. But once Jorge and Rolando were released they were able to inform me that in Villalon Park there were students and social workers placed there by the government. These groups attempted to halt the activities of the Eastern Democratic Alliance which were to take to the streets to hand out fliers with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on them, while also explaining how the Cuban police and government violates this document which was signed 62 years ago.
I don’t know why they are so fearful of a celebration where the present members were holding pieces of paper that, among other things, stated:
Article 19. Every individual has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes not being harassed because of your opinions, having the freedom to investigate and receive information and opinions, and to spread them without the limitation of borders, through any means of media expression.
Article 20: Every person has the right to freedom of peaceful reunion and association. No one shall be forced to belong to a specific association.
Dark, burly and with that untamed something of the typical eastern youth who has emigrated to Havana in search of a better life. His grandmother raised him because his mother abandoned him. He was hauled in front of the court in Guanabacoa, charged with “Pre-criminal Dangerousness,” that Cuban legal monstrosity that lets them charge you with behaviors that show you are “prone to crime,” even though you haven’t done anything. The sanction should have been to find work but there is no work. His alcoholism and drinking had got him in various brawls. The night they brought him in his face was swollen by the “spray” they used on him, he said, and his eyes teared up all night. He told me that in the Department of Technical Investigations (DTI) a cop sprayed him and the others in the cell with pepper spray. Now he was in the Operations Unit because the police alleged they’d received death threats from him and his son. Raciel told us the whole time, but I don’t know. I don’t know if he has kids, a family.
When I left he gave me a hug and asked me to tell people a bit about his story. He’s been deported from Havana — “The capital of all Cubans” — six times. He’s managed to get four temporary documents allowing him to stay there, but every time they send him back with the pretext of being a “socially dangerous pre-criminal.”
Alfredo
I saw him on the bare bunk, no mattress, with his large, frightened eyes. Not even ten minutes passed before we began to chat. He met Jordis García Fournier and Abel López Pérez, political prisoners who had been there the previous night. He is a quiet-looking young man, a lover of baseball, movies and home life. This was his first stay in a cell, he was never fined or cited by any authority.
He said that he left his job in the accounting unit of the Post Office in August; it paid very little and the boss was an ex-military, a bit of an extremist. Three months later, they went to search his house because some documents were missing that guaranteed more than 38,000 Cuban pesos. When he told us this story, we asked him if he had handed over all his documents to his superiors before he left and he said yes, he had, even drawing up a document guaranteeing the handover and, what’s more, it was signed by his boss, secretary of the local Communist Party of Cuba and principal accountant. He said that a week ago he asked the Criminal Investigator to look for this document in his house, and at some point he was allowed to speak with his wife and he told her where to find it. But before each interrogation, the investigator would promise to go to his house and look for the document. The night before I arrived, they had picked him up at 2:00 in the morning and now they were threatening to impose a fine of 2,300 pesos for not having told them earlier about this document, now accusing him of having hid information from the authorities and obstructing the investigation.
Carlos
He’s a Guantanamo native, from the Eastern part of the city. He is somewhat unsociable at first, but as it turns out, he proved to be the most talkative and the most intelligent. Before he was changed for Raciel, he was ranting against the government all night. They had surprised him a week ago, more than 80 kilometers from the Guantanamo Naval Base — more than 80 kilometers. Some auxiliary country peasants from the Border Patrol Troops woke him up from a lazy afternoon’s nap and took him more than 5 kilometers across the land towards the well-known “Posta 16”. There, they turned him in and locked him up. He says that during the first few days they were accusing him of “trying to exit the country illegally”, but later, due to lack of proof, they threatened to sentence him for being the one who assists people to exit Cuba through that region of the country.
These men are three examples of the beauty that can be seen within this horrific scene known as “The Other Guantanamo”, the Abu Ghraib of the Castro Brothers.
It was Saturday, November 27, and we left early for Guantánamo. At 12:40 pm we were at the control point known as Río Frío, a few kilometers from the city of Guaso.
When the police stopped the vehicle we were riding in, they asked me urgently for my identity card, as well as that of the driver, and under the burning Eastern Cuba sun, they used the pretext of checking the vehicle.
My son, Malcolm, who is 7, started to vomit from nausea and lack of food. Some police approached, one of them looking a little embarrassed, but they kept us there a few more hours. At 3:00 pm a G2 official came and they put me in a patrol car and took me directly to the operations unit. A slight altercation left me with a scratch on my forehead and bruise on my arm. The rest was a mere formality. They left my wife Exilda behind with the children. In Guantánamo, Rolando Rodriguez and his wife Yanet Lobaina were waiting for us, because they we were to be the godparents at the christening of their three children on Sunday, the 28th. This was the first time I heard of a Catholic baptism being prohibited in the last 20 years. I was left with the face of my son, Malcolm, as I said goodbye to him, handcuffed in the jeep.
1263
Officer Ramirez told me, “You are number 1263.” To which I answered, “Let’s be clear about this, I won’t respond to that number.” The rest was the anxiety of imprisonment and good conversation with my comrades in the cell. I had to explain to them that I am one of those who is politically persecuted in my country, and that I could even denounce what was happening with them if they told me their stories, But, still afraid, they asked me not to use their names. So I asked them to choose their own pseudonyms: Alfredo, Raciel and Carlos. On another occasion I will tell you their stories.
From 3:00 in the afternoon on Saturday when I entered the operations unit, I took no food until Sunday night when I drank some orange juice, acidic and lacking sweetness, that they gave me in the snack. At dawn on Monday I drank again, some dark broth that once might have been chocolate. The two nights were a hell. The walls are covered with blood stains, as the inmates entertain themselves killing mosquitoes against the wall, and then with their remains they write their names, note the dates, the time they’ve been there and where they’re from. The toilet gave off its stench the whole day, and I could see that they never sweep the cell. I refused to eat, but I could see the food of the other detainees: watery soup with no flavor, they told me, boiled yellow rice, and a boiled egg, cold and hard.
The night before my detention, three young men from Guantanamo, Abel López Pérez, García Fournier and Yoandris Jordis, had been in the same cell; the first two are political prisoners and prominent activists from the peaceful opposition.
I could see how far the bureaucracy has gone to undermine the lives of Cubans. They wanted me to sign off on my detention, the confiscation of my belt and telephone, the return of the belt and telephone, the warning notice, and the release letter. Of course I didn’t sign a thing.
On Monday at 8:00 am they returned me to San Germán. The whole journey was the opposite of that of Saturday when I had gone with my family. It was a return to the inverse, seeing how my country has been turned into a pack of wild animals who trample the gardens. Forbidding us to attend the baptism of three children, what madness.
Early this sunday morning, we were expecting to receive an e-mail with an entry for the readers of “Crossing the Barbed Wire”, but instead what we received was this message from Rolando Lobaina’s Twitter (@LobainaCuba) coming from Guantanamo: “The writer, Luis Felipe Rojas, his wife, and 2 children have been detained by the political police at the entrance of Guantanamo. His current whereabouts are still unknown.”
Up to this moment, Luis Felipe Rojas’ cell phone continues to be “turned off”. It cannot receive any messages, and he has therefore not been able to send out any messages either to his friends. Much less a tweet.
The following is a testimony from Abel Lopez Perez who, a few days before the 3rd of December, was transferred from the Provincial Prison of Guantanamo (in his native city and where he served a political prison sentence) to the horrid dungeons of a prison in Camaguey, where Orlando Zapata was also taken.
In that prison, there was a group of more than twenty political prisoners and common prisoners who supported Orlando Zapata in his civic protest — the hunger strike. The situation in the prison became complicated for the jailers, and they resorted to countless vile deeds in order to try to make the prisoners, and Zapata, give up.
Abel Lopez was released months later with an extra-penal license due to his delicate state of health. He returned to his home in Guantanamo, but the police authorities informed him that he now must comply with certain restrictions. Among them, the principal one is that he cannot travel out of his home municipality — and if he does, he will once again be arrested and sent back to prison.
He has still not been able to visit the cemetery where the remains of the Cuban martyr, Orlando Zapata Tamayo, lie.
I leave you all with his experiences, the same exact way in which he told them to me a month after his release from prison.
“I got to see him within the first days. When we saw each other, I was also carrying out a hunger strike. The guards casually made a mistake and walked him down the same corridor I was in. He recognized me by the tattoo of Marti that I have on my arm, and he said, “Abel”. I responded, “Yes, Zapata. We must continue”. Even though prisoners tend to keep silent and harbor lots of fears, deep inside they have a free person longing to see their country in freedom. And they also keep each other informed, and they did the same with me, informing me of everything that would happen with Zapata.
Before Zapata was checked into the hospital, he was regularly taking some vitamins. He was in a weak state of health. A military chief known as ‘Gordo’, who was the one responsible for ordering all of Zapata’s things to be taken out of the cell and to stop giving him water, also took his bottle of vitamins and poured all the pills down a drain. He told him, ‘Those who are in protest here don’t drink vitamins. I think those are pills sent to you by the Yankees so you can continue your hunger strike.’ Those were the exact words said to him, I verified them. His vitamins were taken away, as were any other medications. And they stopped giving him water for a while.
When they saw that Zapata was determined to reach the last consequences, they changed their strategy. They rushed him to the hospital. During Zapata’s stay in the hospital, a security guard visited me and told me, ‘Abel, someone has to talk to Zapata. Would you be willing to go talk to him?’ I flat out told him that I wasn’t. I would not talk to Zapata. Zapata knew what he was doing, and I was not one to try to influence his decisions.
That was a method of operation used by them to try to discredit him, to try to get people, one by one, to talk to him and convince him to leave the hunger strike. Once in the hospital, he and I were finally able to talk.
Many prisoners who surrounded him, like Otero, and Frank Alvarez (a young man with a life sentence who resided in the cell next to where Zapata was being held), told me that a few days before being taken away, Zapata stood up and shouted, ‘People, don’t let yourselves be lied to. Don’t believe anything that they tell you. I’m not demanding a kitchen or any of the things they took away from me. I’m demanding an improvement of treatment for all prisoners, and so you all know, I am going to die for it.’ I remember the day when we received the tragic news of his death. A few prisoners came running to me and told me, ‘Come here, hurry’. We walked into the small room where there was a television*. There, the young man who was telling me this started to cry and told me, ‘My friend, I was there. Abel, I’m a witness of it all, of his death. Zapata was not demanding any of this’.
I must say that the Granma newspaper committed a crime by saying that Zapata was demanding absurd things like a telephone, a kitchen, a personal room, and a television.
But within that prison itself, I am a witness that in the hospital* section there is a “revolutionary prisoner” who stole large amounts from the state. He is treated differently, and exclusively. While they said that Zapata demanded absurd things, which were just pure lies, this other prisoner enjoyed a “suite”. That prisoner was the one who was at the forefront of managing the hospital of Prison 26. For more than 20 years he has been taking money and resources from there. One day, they casually told me to go visit the hospital, and I actually accepted. That same prisoner resided right in front of Hospital 26. He has a room, a telephone, a radio, an electric kitchen, and even a heater. When I saw the State Security Major, Bombino*, I told him, ‘How is it that Granma tauntingly says that Zapata demanded these things. How is it possible that right there in number 26 resides the engineer, the prisoner in charge of the construction of the hospital and he has all of these things?’ He responded, ‘Well, that is the engineer who is in charge of the hospital.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘But he is a prisoner. Isn’t he supposed to be confined to a high security prison, just like the rest of us?’ He simply told me, ‘No, no, he can have all that stuff.’
And while the newspaper mocked Zapata, this was occurring. Goes to show you the differences between a “revolutionary” prisoner and the rest of us, the defenders of human rights.
And I must repeat: those were very grim days, filled with sorrow because of Zapata’s death.
*they told me: Abel is referring to those who would report from prison that they had taken Zapata’s water and vitamins.
*the hospital: Referring to the Camaguey Amalia Simoni Civil Hospital which has a waiting room for those who are sentenced. They check in prisoners from various jails in the province in this hospital.
*the television: Referring to the images played by the Cuban Television in which they discredited the hunger strike of Zapata where Raul Castro, together with the Brazilian president, referred to “some prisoner who died”.
*Bombino: Refers to the political police guard by the name of Julio Cesar Bombino, one of the figures deeply involved with the fate of Orlando Zapata in Camaguey. He is one of the highest ranking State Security officials in that province.
Brauilio Cuenca Cruz was the one who told me about it. He said he was fined in the amount of 30 pesos just for publicly expressing his nonconformity with regards to the Cuban health system. This occurred during the meeting of Popular Power, which took place in the small town of Antilla, where he claimed his right to criticize the skyrocketing cost of the neonatal services in the municipal hospital of that town.
Braulio added that there were leaders of the party and of the government present in the meeting. At the conclusion of the assembly, he was approached by a police officer who imposed a fine on him for “supposedly” wanting to sabotage the government meeting. A native of Antilla, Cuenca Cruz, assured me that he will not pay the fine and he knows that because of this he will run the risk of having the fine increased. He says he is doing it to be persistent, and that for believing in justice he will have to go to trial to demand his rights. He feels that he has the right to freely express himself, even if it is in front of those who run the country and the municipality.
I did not tell him my opinion about his intention to speak out against the fine, because I don’t find it appropriate that I induce people to make certain decisions. I remember that, not too long ago, my wife took some “legal” (if you can refer to something in my country in that way) steps. We turned in some formal demands to the Provincial Fiscal Office, and in a matter of little time they cited me to appear at their hermetical offices of Holguin. The results of that citation are known to my readers, for I described it here on my blog.
But since I do not want to feel guilty for not warning the rest, I read the report which the Guantanamo native Anderlay Guerra Blanco posted just a few weeks prior in the blog El Palenque.
Dolin Dachao Alexander expressed his sentiments against the Cuban dictatorship from the roof of his house itself during an Assembly of Popular Power which took place in his hometown. He began to shout, “Down with the dictatorship! Down with Fidel Castro! Down with Raul Castro!” in front of all those who were present.
He was immediately detained and shoved into a police car, which would take him to the provincial unit of State Security operations. In the popular tribunal of that city, they carried out a trail for him because of supposed lack of respect in the cause of 20/2010. When they sentenced him with 10 months of forced labor, Dolin responded with the same exact words which got him jailed in the first place.
On the 13th of April of this year, a new trial was carried out for Dolin at the theater of the Combinado Prisons of Guantanamo. This time, he was being tried for disrespecting those at the tribunal due to the words he spoke against the regime during the last trial. His relatives were not present. Only soldiers presided over the Roman Circus. They added 10 months more to his punishment, this time to be served under imprisonment. Dolin was not frightened, and he once again shouted, “Down with the dictatorship! Down with Fidel Castro! Down with Raul Castro! Justice for the Cuban people!”
I remember all the times my wife has shouted those same phrases to the police when they have come to detain me. She knows the risks she runs, and yet she does not hesitate to express what she thinks of them. I recall the stories of Caridad Caballero, Marta Diaz Rondon, Idalmis Nunez, and all my compatriots from the Alliance, Rolando and Cristian Toranzo, when they all detailed to me what they lived through within the “instruction centers” of Pedernales, where they also screamed for freedom at the top of their lungs. The women showed me their bruised lips, products of beatings against them intending to shut their mouths.
I remember Reina when she told me, “With a piece of cloth soaked in gasoline they covered my mouth, for they were trying to asphyxiate me so I would not scream ‘Zapata lives, and the Castros murdered my son.'”
Alberto Vega Mackensi, who just a few months ago was a bread distributor in Holguin, told me that the sector chief of the National Revolutionary Police, Alfredo Ortiz, has summoned him on various occasions, demanding him to look for work in the construction or agricultural field. If he fails to do so, the officer has notified him that he could then be accused of social dangerousness.*
Vega commented to me that this time they simply warned him, but that he now only had a few weeks to start searching for employment. If he fails, then he will have to go before a court. They have already spoken to him about accusations, and in my country that translates into imprisonment for more than a — and that’s if he is lucky. Vega then told me that he knows a few young men who have been threatened during the last couple of days by these same police whose sector belongs to the third unit of the city.
Meanwhile, other people, who have asked to remain anonymous, assured me that he Chiefs of the Police Sectors and “Chiefs from the Commission of Social Prevention” have called a meeting with the unemployed people of the labor sector to force them to work, a contradiction which affects many, especially when the government authorities have announced massive lay-offs in sectors like public health, interior trade, the sugar industry, and some administrative dependencies. They confess that they do not understand such contradictions.
A few days ago, I traveled out of San German. I left behind the murmurs of the nonconformists, complaining about the news of so many lay-offs, about the monitored meetings to be held in each neighborhood, and the very limited options for future employment. But in the places I traveled to, I heard no other subject. Artists from the different theatre, music, and painting groups, along with workers from the House of Culture will all have to go through the difficult process as well, according to what a friend of mine told me. People who work in offices, cafeterias, education, and a number of health workers also complained.
What I did notice, however, was that no police officer mentioned that they had been laid off, nor a single member of the Communist Party, or the government, which is called here the “Popular Power”. None of these people mentioned that the situation was “not right”, and that they would have to go work in agriculture, unless they wanted to be considered socially dangerous.
Photo: Luis Felipe Rojas
*Translator’s Note: “Social dangerousness” is a crime defined as the potential to commit a crime, and carries a 1 to 4 year prison term.
Despite the fence and police surveillance that I’ve won by being a disobedient Twitterer, I was able to go to Guantánamo on November 8. I knew that Rolando Rodríguez Lobaina, José Cano Fuentes and Yober Sevila were already back home after their arrests and beatings from October 31 in Banes, and their confinement in the cells of G-2 until November 2 in Holguin. There Rolando tells me that while I was traveling to the other end of the island to deliver to X the recent issues of the Valencia Solidarity Project journals, that would be placed in the virtual village in their traditional PDF format, he was charged with total discretion to compose another story.
Rolando as Coordinator of the Eastern Democratic Alliance was articulating the methods for how to carry out his call to pay tribute to Orlando Zapata Tamayo and give the honor of Mother of all Cubans to Reina Luisa Tamayo. It had to be there in the place where they buried the Cuban who marked, with his death, the last days of the dictatorship. But getting to Banes seemed almost impossible because on Thursday they closed off the town, with the G-2 soldiers everywhere with a list of names and a catalog of photos in hand to identify anyone trying to come into the town, so there had to be a change of plans. While he was doing it he didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask him. I just heard his version of the events and I am posting here a portion of the transcript of his account, as I promised earlier in the post Pieces of an Assault:
“The march was in progress and we were in the cemetery. Once we were at the foot of the tomb of Zapata, everyone started to come, all of them in droves. Hundreds of soldiers were divided into three blocks. A block came into the cemetery from the rear, another block occupied the right side of the cemetery exit, and a third block arrayed themselves on the left hand side with the buses and patrol cars located where we would have to exit.
“Once we saw that the assault was imminent, we decided to link ourselves together, locking arms, and put the women in the middle and leave in a block like that. When we got to the bottom of the cemetery they fell on us. They were pulling, taking us out of the cordon, beating and kicking us. One of them used martial arts on me, around my neck, nearly breaking it. And when I was locked in that position another one came and gave me several punches to the ribs, the body, and so they savagely, brutally, forced us into the buses that were also full of officers from State Security. They pushed us in there. I saw them beating Ramoncito from Mesa de Banes, and Rogelito, Zapata’s brother, it all happened too fast to deal with it.
“Reina was in the middle but I don’t know why as they were pulling on us as we tried to protect her, everyone was in the middle of the floor because we started to sing the national anthem and all that, but I can say we were brutally repressed with kicks and punches and thrown violently onto the buses. And in the buses, between them shouting ‘Viva Fidel’ and us shouting ‘Down with Fidel!’ and ‘Down with Communism’ and ‘Down with the Dictatorship’ and all these things, they drove us to the headquarters in Banes.
“First they took the people from Gunatanamo and took us out and put us in a convoy of patrol cars, and then took us to Pedernales (The G-2 Training Center in Holguin). There in Pedernales we learned from the same soldiers that since early in the day there had been a platoon of patrol cars going to Banes, so the contingency was already prepared. So they broke us up and put us in different cells on the double. It was very full of police and guards there at the center of criminal investigations, of Pedernales operations. So there we were shouting slogans.
“They kept us there until Tuesday when they took us to Guantanamo in police cars, but not before giving us a series of police warnings and threats. They talked about applying Law 88 to us, the well known Gag Law, and tried to get us to sign the warnings but as always we refused to sign this paper because we have not committed any crime and they have committed them in violating our rights as citizens. This time when we refused they brought video cameras to film the moment in which they extended the document to us and we said we wouldn’t accept it. They said making this video recording would constitute proof to the authorities.
“We were from different provinces but in our case it was three from Guantanamo and two from Baracoa. I don’t know any more about what happened with the women or with the other brothers who were arrested and beaten. On Tuesday night they took us back to where we live. In the case of Rodolfo Barthelemí and Francisco Luis Manzanet who live in Baracoa, they took them but didn’t leave them in the town but rather they dropped them on a road where cars rarely pass at night. They told me that they weren’t able to catch a ride and go back to their hometown until morning.
“That day there were several messages on Twitter about what was happening there, and some calls made to call the attention of the free world to what was happening when we left the cemetery, and we managed at least to basically cross the cordon. I thought about the repercussions of what had happened and because thousands of people knew about the aggressions and arrests and that the G-2 cut all telephone and cell service so that no one could call, so that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the incident too soon But on Sunday, the 7th, when I got my phone back, and Reina’s and yours had lost all ability to receive or send calls, I realized again that those beasts had invaded Reina’s home. We have to keep going into the streets of Cuba to make them value our rights.”
Here is some evidence of what we are talking about, although I transcribed the complete conversation.
My telephone battery runs down twice a day. Every three minutes I receive local calls, which, of course, I don’t respond to. On occasion, when I have responded I have received insults, threats, and attempts to destabilize me. As for the usual restrictions which the repressive forces exercise against me, we now see the shady complicity of the Telecommunications Company, together with the vandalism of the G2 official, Saul Vega, and his assistant, snitch, and fellow rat, Maikel Rodriguez Alfajarrin (shown in the photograph with the striped shirt).
Rodriguez Alfajarrin is the Chief of the Confrontation Brigade in the Municipal Housing Unit of San German. His job consists of detaining those who rent out houses illegally, carry out construction without permits, and those who buy land, or transfer it from one family member to another to avoid turning it into the state. Among the informal accusations of the citizens, which in the end turn out not to be very well heard, is the statement about the high standard of living of the state inspectors, which receive a hefty salary.
Their repressive job also consists of harassment over the phone. In fact, I surprised them in such an act when, this past Wednesday, they called me from a public number and I searched the last two missed calls, later calling myself from that telephone to prove it was them. Cynicism and shamefulness. A supposed official acting like a midwife, lingering around at home all day paying close attention to all the details of the lives of those who surround her.
Thanks to CUBACEL, more than 15 cellphones ceased working at the same time on Sunday, the 31st, when they were beating the dissidents in Banes, along with Reina Luisa. In the same vein, this past weekend my cell phone’s text messaging and twitter service stopped working yet again, ever since Friday. On the screen of my phone, it read “limited service.” Caridad Caballero Batista, an independent journalist in Holguin, filed a complaint at the ETECSA Territorial Manager’s Office.
The young ladies from the CUBACEL customer service department, especially Niurka, jumped into a real tongue-twister. She kept going back and forth while I was asking about the connections between the political police and the company she worked for. She asked me if I had perhaps dropped my phone, and I responded that the only time it got hit was when two technicians, working in the service of the G2 at the company she works for, decided to mess with it.
Now, such an outrage has gotten even worse in regards to all the thefts committed to Rolando Rodriguez Lobaina, Jorge Ceballos, Nestor R. Lobaina, and many others. Their phones have not been given back to them. Caridad Caballero herself, when they confiscated her phone, went all the way to the commercial office, once again reporting it as lost — and that was it, everyone went back home as if were nothing.
The G2 steals our phones while CUBACEL sells you connection lines again!!!!
Temporary suspension of service lines, harassments over the phone, offensive messages being sent from unknown numbers, confiscation and breaking of cell phones, restrictions on sending out international messages, and the prohibition of being able to receive “re-charges” from abroad. These are just some of the obstacles which a business with double-moral, such as ETECSA, which relies on investments of Mexican, Italian, and other capitals, offer to their customers, all the while abiding by the rules of the olive-green leaders.
Very nice promotion, excellent offers. A model of corporate Cuban perfection.
Martha Díaz Rondón tells me, “There were more than thirty of us. We took flowers to honor Orlando Zapata Tamayo and the word to pray for him and to say ‘Zapata Lives’ as we were leaving the cemetery as we have done in spite of acts of repudiation and other provocations on other Sundays, when there has been no accredited press.
“When we left the church the atmosphere was very tense but we followed the usual program and entered the cemetery. Leaving was the worst.
“We all were severely beaten, the men acted as a shield but it wasn’t enough. The men tried to protect us and put us in the middle. They made a human chain but the combined forces, trained to beat people, broke the chain and disabled us by force. They forced us onto buses with blows, including Reina Luisa who is an older woman with health problems. All of us were taken to the police station in Banes.
“There, the women suffered the worst humiliations. I was stripped naked, forced me to take off my panties and do squats in front of the guards. We saw the guards because they had the doors open. Gertrudis Ojeda Suarez, Dulce María, Prado Portal Barbara, and another girl whose name I can’t remember, and Romero Maritza Cardoso, all went through the same humiliation.
“Those who forced us to do it were women they brought from the prison. We asked them to close the doors because the male uniformed police officers, and those not in uniform who were political police, were there outside the doors and they could see everything, but they wouldn’t. The men were looking at us as they did the search.
“Then they took us to Holguin to a place called Pedernales (the Ministry of the Interior Training Center) and as if the previous search wasn’t enough, they did the same thing all over again. They stripped me, made me take off my blouse and everything, and then made me do squats while pulling down my pants. In this place they put us in the cells and we were there until Monday night, when they returned us to our hometowns but not without giving us a warning letter. They said they were going to charge us with Law 88, which we all know as the Gag Law. None of us ever signed those papers and we told them that yes, we were going to follow up, and then they told us we had been warned and we could end up in prison.
“They were trying to intimidate us and keep us from accompanying Reina Luisa to the cemetery every Sunday, and from undertaking the ZAPATE VIVE marches.
“Today my arms and legs are all covered in bruises and I ache all over. They gave it to Gertrudis in her chin and it’s very inflamed, and Belkis Barbara Portal was also beaten very hard, Reina Luisa could not feel worse and her children can’t even talk.
“I couldn’t see the men from the other towns because they took them to Guantanamo and other provinces after holding them prisoner there in Pedernales, but those I’ve seen here in Banes and Antilla have a lot of bumps and bruises.”
II
Ditzán Saavedra Prats sent me a text message from his cell phone just as they were launching the attack against them outside the Banes cemetery. Then I lost communications and I believed they had been arrested. A little later I called to get more information about what had happened. He said,
“What I saw left a big impression on me. I never imagined that they would attack a group of men and women and beat them in that way. The only thing we had to defend ourselves with was our voices singing the national anthem and saying ‘Long Live Human Rights,’ ‘Zapata Lives,’ and ‘Down with the Dictatorship.’ They used every martial arts technique there is, kicking us, dragging us, beating us. Some of them put choke holds on us and I thought I was drowning or that they had broken my neck. The men tried to protect the women, but it was impossible. There were many political police dressed in plain clothes; I don’t know where they came from but it wasn’t Banes because I know everyone here. Those dressed in police uniforms weren’t allowed to beat us but they were allowed to help them force us into the cars. They forced us onto the buses and if anyone threw himself to the ground he was dragged.
“Brother, I don’t want to overlook what they did to Reina Luisa Tamayo and the other women. She is a dignified human being and doesn’t deserve that. They beat them, dragged them, kicked them.
“Once they got everyone in the buses and the buses hadn’t started yet they came inside and beat everyone with even more fury. And what hurts most is that no one saw that. Those among us who had cameras had their bags quickly thrown out and they took away the cameras and the cell phones. There will be no record of that day because no journalists came even though we had announced so often that we were going to March; it seems strange.
“I denounce the political police and the Castro regime and say one more time that Reina Luisa and her family are in danger and that we, the members of the Democratic Alliance, will always stand by her and support her.”
This time I am limiting myself to only transcribing what my friends told me. But this is not everything. The testimony of other victims will unfold later. If the information mountain will not come here to Eastern Cuba, we will go the Mountain; through my blog we will cross the barbed wire so that everyone will know that we want Freedom but we are seeking it without weapons, without hate, without vengeance.
When a government mistreats and beats women it is a government of assholes.
Jose Antonio Triguero Mulet’s house, and my house, have both been watched since Thursday, the 28th of October, despite the fact that they are on the outskirts of town, as I previously reported on Twitter. But it wasn’t until Sunday, the 31st, that the political police once again found their way onto my porch.
They shouted offensive comments to the owner of the house where I live, a man who is more than seventy-years-old. They told me to accompany them to the police barracks. Because I refused to walk with them through the streets and demanded that a car take me instead, Major Charles ordered an officer to bring handcuffs. On the way to the police station, one could hear the screams of my wife, Exilda, shouting things like “dictators,” “assassins,” and that “one day they will pay for this.” Such phrases, which I will not dwell on too much, alarmed many of our neighbors, who took to their windows and doors to witness how they jailed a writer, making him walk in front of everyone as if he were a criminal.
This time I spent 9 hours in a dark corner. I was able to pray a bit, but all the while mobs of mosquitoes literally “ate” me. Near where I was, there were some prisoners, charged with “aggressions which caused serious injuries to their victims,” and also two brothers who, earlier that day, had attacked someone with a machete. Another four had been locked up for days because they had robbed a grocery store and taken all the food rations of an entire neighborhood. There was also a recluse who threatened to kill his wife.
And that’s where they put me. That is the way I was able to see some of the details of how the “national revolutionary police” operates.
I continue being taken to those places without ever having my name written down on the list of those detained. But every time someone calls my wife to ask about me, she reports me as “missing.” I don’t want to think that the improper visit of the Municipal Prosecutor, Saili Aranda, and another young military prosecuting officer during the night had anything to do with this. I leave it up to the reader to decide, but I must say that the guards did nothing about it.
Photo: Luis Felipe Rojas
From the early morning hours I had been reporting, through Twitter, about the “Zapata Lives” march which was occurring in Banes. Later, I gave details about the beatings and arrests of the activists from the Eastern Democratic Alliance, who once again accompanied Reina Luise Tamayo in Banes. Right after my arrest, my cell phone was no longer able to receive calls or text messages, and I could not send out any either. Outside friends told me that when they would call the number it would give a busy tone and then a message would come on saying that the number dialed did not exist. And I must add that no one, from anywhere in the world, has been able to “re-charge” my phone because it simply “does not go through.”
In a little while, I will be on my way to the commercial offices of Cubacel. I want to hear them, in their own voices, explain to me which part of the contract — which the Cuban government itself actually authorized between nationals and the cell phone company — I violated, and which of these clauses is the one that has allowed them to jail me, restrict me, and trample on my right to my rights.
When I dictated this post this morning to a friend who has always been aware of my aspirations and having and maintaining my blog from Holguin, she told me, and here I want to record it in writing, “You never thought you were going to face, from your writing, a ‘reality’ that the Great Nobel Winner Mario Vargas Llosa would say, “sometimes is stranger than fiction.'”
In just a few months I have received, from the small town of Banes along the northern coast of my province, reports that fill me with sadness. Here is one of them:
The citizen Yosdani Pavón Espinosa was shot in the right thigh last October 1st of this year, by the police officer Vladimir Camejo, chief of the Cañadon in Banes sector of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR).
Mrs. Marta Díaz Rondón told me that the police abandoned to his fate the young man Pavón Espinosa, who was operated on without having the bullet removed, and who was admitted to the surgical clinic of the hospital in Banes under heavy police guard.
The account of the victim’s family complained that the criminologist reconstructed the facts of the case based on the testimony of the aggressor, Camejo’s, nephew, without conducting any alcohol testing (both the official and is relatives are well-known alcoholics).
Marta went on to say that the office Vladimir Camejo already has one shooting death on his record and three whom he has wounded in the same way. One of them is a young driver who didn’t want to pick him up in the truck he was driving and as a “punishment” he received a bullet.
“Despite these facts,” Díaz Rondón told me, “the military has never been warned by the police chief in Holguin. Six citizens were willing to speak on behalf of the victim, Pavón Espinosa, and to testify that he had been abandoned by the aggressor. Among them were Juan Carlos Cruz, Julio Gómez y Héctor Hidalgo.”
“These incidents include that of Mariblanca Avila, Cari Caballero Batista and Marta Díaz Rondón herself, when they tried to show support for Reina Luisa on Sundays, but neither the responsible agencies, nor the high priests, nor the Cuban police listened, as I have told you. There has been no punishment nor reprimands for the uniformed aggressors. Much less for the non-uniformed personnel who were see, allowed, and participated in the ‘tumultuous feast.'”
What will happen the day that a bullet “escapes” from one of these bestial crusades that is launched every Lord’s Day against the family of Orland Zapata Tamayo?
*Hours after Luis Felipe dictated this post he was arrested in his house in San Germán. The motives for the arrest are unknown at this time, and also a violent repression has been launched in Banes against the opponents who accompany Reina Luisa to offer tribute at her son Orlando Zapata Tamayo’s grave.
The eastern half of the country has seen the ghost of development go by in official speeches and in the trains and planes going to Havana or overseas. When a high government official tediously insisted on making promises of economic development, immediately the political machine would start a “shock public works project.” Who doesn’t remember the power plant of Nuevitas, the Nickel factory in Moa, the cement factory in Santiago de Cuba, or the expansion of the hotel capacity in the Guardalavaca zone, in Holguín ?
Not so long ago I went back the Nickel producing region in search of a half-buried story which started there and which is being continued in the Che Guevara plant in Moa, where an unforgiving wind took more prisoners to Villa Marista — the notorious State Security prison in Havana — without any explanations.
Several questions kept going around my head. I knew that I could share all of them with my readers, but I hurried on to those related to the prisoners in February. I delayed the one related to the environmental pollution and respiratory diseases suffered by many over there, but the note about an arrested and jailed manager who was transferred to the oncology ward of the provincial hospital led me to an article written by the exiled journalist Juan Carlos Garcell. It says: “Medical sources reported on a study made in 2002 regarding respiratory diseases in workers exposed to the lateritic mineral dust in the Che Guevara factory (Moa) during a five-month period, and which covered the 926 workers belonging to the seven departmentswhere exposure was the greatest. The study noted that the most prevalent pathology waschronic obstructive lung disease; 83.42% had a normal hematocrit; altered respiratory functional tests were found in a 42.33% of subjects; and 66.33% had acute pulmonary lung disease as a radiological sign.”
I thought about the former manager who had a marginally better life than a common worker, I thought also of the others. The air they breathe over there doesn’t have the name of the one who will breathe it, it’s always polluted.The dust rises and goes along the streets and highways destroying promises without discriminating based on age or hierarchy. Where did they go, the dreams of thousands of young men who moved from Havana and Matanzas to Moa to build a new country?
When some of these megaprojects stopped working as propaganda, the dreams went bust. The ramshackle buildings, increasing cost of food, and deficient local management transformed these so-called “industrial cities” into abandoned cemeteries.
History’s paradox, government’s lies, deceit and false promise, become reality, now raised as a flag by the humblest of citizens.
* The article was published in the illegal monthly journal El cubano libre (The Free Cuban) in 2006, and several of its authors received threats for their part in exposing it.
Since a wave of new unemployment is occurring throughout the country, domestic initiatives are also being pushed. The state co-operatives do not allow anyone else on their staff or in their plant, and as for the surplus going towards agriculture…we’re going to have to see about that, my friend. Sharecroppers in every corner sharpen their tools and stuff near their homes in order to try to make the land produce. Now, there is a surplus of working hands in the defective state-run system, and the simplest of the working peasants are taking in their urban neighbors.
Rafael, for decades, suffered the scorn of those who thought they were secure at their desks, while he sat on the seat of a truck or at the security checkpoint of a factory.
Today, those who scorned him are sitting at the door to his house, having been propelled to the countryside to find a spot where they can join their peers in the countryside. Since I am not a prophet, weatherman nor an economist, I usually contradict myself: I am betting there will be an individual push; the desire not to die of hunger will make many more look to the land they once trod with disdain to find where the fruit will come from to put on their tables.
The more you press play, the Maroons were more runaways. There is a binge of optimism, this will not release all lines, but will drop some blindfolds and unplugging some ears of stone.
Them more they tighten the game, the more the wild ones push back. It’s not a rash of optimism, this will not loosen the mooring ropes, but it will drop some of the blindfolds and unplug some of the ears of stone.
Photo/Luis Felipe Rojas
Photo: Luis Felipe Rojas
Photo: Luis Felipe Rojas