In Castro’s Cuba those who dare to confront the system, like the Creoles who faced the Crown during the colonial period, will be imprisoned, tortured, killed or exiled.
Nothing has changed. The Castro regime continues to harass those who think differently; they are making me pay for my posts by bringing me to this closed prison to which they have “sentenced” me, according to their own laws, it is another violation of my rights as because I should be in a prison camp, as I was in La Lima Prison.
But it’s not enough that they unjustly condemned me without any proof or that they locked me in prison, I have been put in a cell block where the prisoners are on a severe regime, those who have committed serious crimes. Because it is State Security who controls my fate in jail and Lieutenant Colonel Reuben of Section 21 warned me so, on his visit to the La Lima prison.
Here in the 1580 Prison, the inmates at times pressure me because everyone wants me to listen to their pain, for me to tell the world of the injustices and abuses that the Cuban prison system commits against them. And I leave my writing and reading to listen. And they show me the beds of those who have committed suicide.
Beside me, one shows me his arms marked all along their length, cuts that he has done more and more as a protest against injustice. The re-educators should ensure that they respect our “rights,” but they’re incapable of it, and sometimes you see them move from one place to another with their military uniforms waiting for their work shifts to end.
Many prisoners have completed their sentences but because of bureaucratic paperwork remain imprisoned.
They, in their silence and in the opposition with their voices, one day very soon, will be rewarded with a society of Rights.
Ángel Santiesteban-Prats
1580 Prison, San Miguel del Padrón. April 2013
28 April 2013
