New Reports About Operation Nicaro / Luis Felipe Rojas

Rolando Pérez Rodriguez, a director at the René Ramos Latour nickel plant of Nicaro Holguín who has been in custody since February of this year is severely ill and hospitalized and sources close to his family told me.

Pérez Rodríguez, an engineer, is on trial along with other executives from the Holguin nickel industry. The sources told me that doctors say he has pulmonary ischemia, and they have extracted two quarts of liquid from his lungs.

As a patient Perez Rodriguez is in Ward A, Room 10 in the men’s ward at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Provincial Hospital.

In conversation with another source it turns out that for months Rolando’s family has been demanding his transfer to a hospital, because of the damp conditions where he was being held in preventive detention. But the prison officials of the State Security Operations Center in Pedernales, on the outskirts of the provincial capital, have refused, alluding to the their need to follow the procedures of an investigation.

The reasons he was taken, as a prisoner, to the hospital are not known, but many presume it was because of his delicate state of health.

Engineer Rolando Perez was exposed to the contamination nickel are in the mines of the Nicaro processing plant in Mayarí, Holguín.

October 16, 2010