For arriving late from her leave, the authorities threatened to move her to a harsher regime.
14ymedio, Havana, 30 August 2024 — Political prisoner Yilian Oramas García ended her hunger strike at the Cuba Panama prison for HIV-positive prisoners on Tuesday. The woman from Villa Clara had been punished with a change of regime from less to more rigorous after arriving late from leave on August 13. Oramas, who lives more than 250 kilometres from the prison in Mayabeque, initiated the protest to ask for the measure to be revoked. The authorities finally agreed this week after changing the sanction to two home-visit suspensions.
In addition to having HIV, Oramas, 43, is also diabetic and after the strike she had to be treated by prison health staff. “She was very weak because she is diabetic, they gave her IVs in the little hospital they have in the prison,” her mother, María Josefa Oramas, told Martí Noticias.
According to the woman, Oramas “ended the strike, because the head of Mayabeque Prisons and Jails (Yunior Lázaro Santana), together with State Security, cancelled her revocation, which was for two years and, instead, they took away two of her home visits.”
The mother breathes a sigh of relief since a change to a more severe regime would mean that her daughter must serve the entire sentence.
Although she considers the measure unjust, her mother breathes a sigh of relief, since a change to a more severe regime would mean that her daughter must serve the entire sentence without the right to an early release. “You don’t win against the dictatorship, but the revocation meant she had to serve the three years,” she said.
Oramas was sentenced to six years in prison for participating in the August 15, 2021 protests in front of the funeral home in the city of Santa Clara, where she lives, to demand better health care amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Her husband, Geobel Manso, was also arrested on that day and is currently incarcerated. The court charged Oramas with the crimes of attack and resistance.
Worse off is the political prisoner Loreto Hernández García – arrested after the protests of 11 July 2021 (11J) in Placetas (Villa Clara) – who is serving his sentence in the men’s prison of Guamajal. According to what his daughter Rosabel Sánchez told Martí Noticias after visiting her father and his wife Donaida Pérez Paseiro – also a prisoner of conscience – Hernández is in a bad physical condition.
“During this visit, we were able to talk, we were able to observe, we were able to visualize for ourselves the situation that my father’s health presents. My father, every time we go to see him, he loses more weight,” Sanchez explained. “He often gets a pain on his left side, a pain that radiates to his left lung. He is getting shortness of breath, his diabetes is unbalanced (…) He explains to us that on several occasions he becomes weak and tired. As for his health, we saw that he has not improved at all, he is getting worse and worse, he is in very bad shape,” she denounced.
According to Sánchez, prison authorities use her father’s poor health condition to coerce him.
According to Sanchez, prison authorities use her father’s poor health condition to coerce him and promise him a transfer to a less severe regime where he can be cared for and serve a shorter sentence. “State Security has approached him and has proposed he take advantage of the benefits to give him the minimum sentence and move him to the camp to start granting him leaves and things like that, and both he and his wife refuse these benefits,” said Sanchez, who assures that the couple “is standing firm.”
Hernández and his wife, at the time of the protests, presided over the Asociación Yorubas Libres de Cuba, in Placetas, and were sentenced to seven and eight years in prison respectively. Organizations and institutions such as Amnesty International, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Cuban Prison Documentation Center and Christian Solidarity International, as well as the U.S. State Department, have included them in their reports and records as political prisoners and have demanded the Cuban regime to release them.
Last June, prisoner of conscience Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca arrived in the United States after the authorities forced his departure. He was emaciated and ill as a result of the ill-treatment he suffered at the hands of his jailers. “I have been tortured a lot,” stressed the journalist, who served three years in Havana’s Combinado del Este, the country’s largest prison.
Translated by LAR
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