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Agustin Blazquez with the collaboration of Jaums Sutton.
Friday, Aug. 9, 2002. NewsMax.com.
Due to the overzealous guardians of academic political correctness – a
communist- engendered abomination that is instituting censorship little by
little while deleting freedom of speech from the public forum in the U.S. –
the book "The
Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba," by Charles J. Brown and
Armando M. Lago, published in the U.S. in 1991, was totally ignored. However, it
did receive great reviews in Europe and even in the former Soviet Union!
This book documented 31 cases of psychiatric abuses in Mazorra Psychiatry
Hospital in Havana. In addition to this book, two addendums to the United
Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva (1992 and 1993) presented 40 more
documented cases. The South Florida Psychiatric Association found approximately
100 new cases in 1995 among the rafters detained at Guantanamo. And in 1996, the
office of Research at Radio Marti found 200 more documented cases, making a
total of 371 known cases.
Said Dr. Lago, one of the authors of the book: "In the former Soviet
Union, with a population of three hundred million, there were 300 well
documented cases of psychiatric abuse against political dissidents (1 per
million). However, Cuba's eleven million inhabitants, with 371 cases is a
shocking contrast (1 per 30,000)."
In 1997 I was astonished to learn that the Pan American Health Organization
(PAHO), on Sept. 25, 1997, gave their Award for Administration, 1997, to Eduardo
Bernabe Ordaz, M.D., the director of the same Mazorra Psychiatric Hospital. It
was preposterous that Dr. Ordaz, director for life of Mazorra, a hospital
notorious for punishing political dissidents with heavy doses of psychotropic
drugs and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), would be awarded by an international
organization like PAHO.
At that time, Daniel Epstein, PAHO's press officer, declared that this
annual award was given to Dr. Ordaz in recognition of "his pioneering
efforts in the establishing of rehabilitation programs and the humanization of
hospital care for persons suffering from chronic illness."
In a 1997 letter to President Clinton, Florida Congresswoman Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen condemned PAHO's award to Dr. Ordaz.
She also wrote to PAHO's director, Sir George O. Alleyne, about Dr. Ordaz's
award, saying, "It is an embarrassment that an individual who has used his
medical knowledge to further a totalitarian dictatorship be rewarded for his
brutality." And she urged the revocation of the award.
In a Sept. 30 letter to her colleagues on Capitol Hill, she presented three
cases of psychiatric abuses at Mazorra, commenting, "How an international
health organization that received millions in American taxpayer monies every
year can reward the director of this hospital is incomprehensible."
Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen urged her colleagues to co-sign the letter asking for
the revocation of Dr. Ordaz's award.
PAHO, despite numerous complaints, did not revoke the award and did not
apologize to the victims of Dr. Ordaz and his hospital. This was the equivalent
of giving an award to Dr. Josef Mengele, the ardent Nazi server of Hitler who
was the chief doctor at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
In 1991, Dr. Lago met with PAHO's then-director, Dr. Carlyle Guerra de
Macedo, and asked him to send a letter to Cuba asking for answers to the charges
in his book. PAHO refused. In 1992, PAHO's representative in Havana, Dr. Miguel
Marquez, sponsored a seminar praising Cuba's efforts in the fields of human
rights and psychiatry.
Dr. Lago complained of the travesty to the U.S. State Department official in
charge of supervising PAHO's operation, and according to Dr. Lago, "I was
given the run-around."
Furthermore, in January 1996, Dr. Ordaz refused to allow the American
Psychiatric Association to visit Mazorra.
In order to attend PAHO's annual award presentation, Dr. Ordaz was given a
U.S. visa by the Clinton administration's State Department and he flew to
Washington, D.C.
Dr. Ordaz had the privilege of receiving another U.S. visa from the Clinton
administration to attend the baseball game at Camden Yard in Baltimore when the
Cuban baseball team defeated the Orioles.
It was remarkable that the U.S. State Department issued two visas to a
person of Dr. Ordaz's background when it often denies visas to former Cuban
political prisoners and their families, who suffered dearly under Castro's
tyrannical rule.
Dr. Lago says that U.S. visas are also often denied to dissidents. He cites
the example of Martha Beatriz Roque, an economist and a pro-democracy activist
in Cuba who spent time in Castro's dungeons. She was invited in 1993 to be the
keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the
Cuban Economy (ASCE) and was denied a U.S. visa.
However, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in Miami issued a
U.S. resident visa in 1985 to Mazorra's infamous torturer, Heriberto Mederos
(State Security Official assigned to Mazorra, whose crimes are mentioned on 20
pages of Brown and Lago's book). In the early 1980s Mederos arrived in Miami,
where many of his former victims live, and they identified him. In 1993 he was
granted U.S. citizenship.
If the Cuban-American community in Miami was as violent and intolerant as it
is often depicted by the U.S. media and academia, Mederos would not have
survived all these years in the heart of the Cuban exile community.
In spite of the complaints of his former victims and the testimonies and
documentation presented in the book of Brown and Lago, the Clinton
administration and Janet Reno's Justice Department did nothing about Mederos.
Lago even sent his book to Reno with a note about Mederos being in Miami,
without results.
Amnesty International included Mederos this year among the international
torturers living in the U.S. But it was mainly due to the efforts of the
International Education Mission, with headquarters in Boynton Beach, Fla., that
Mederos' arrest took place. He was charged with "crimes against humanity."
Finally, on July 15, 2002, Mederos, 78, was brought to trial in federal
court. He was accused of lying to the INS during his citizenship process in 1993
to hide his past as a torturer of political prisoners at Mazorra Psychiatric
Hospital.
According to a source who attended the trial, the main theme for the defense
of Mederos was to attack the credibility of the memory of his victims in the
Castellanos wing of the Mazorra Psychiatric Hospital. During the interrogation
of one of the victims, the source noted the unprofessional attitude of an
official of the Miami INS office in relation to one of the witnesses it brought
forth.
This female INS official had taken verbal testimony from the witness in the
past.
The official was seated with the prosecution team, directly in front of the
source. Sitting beside the source was a friend of the INS official. Because of
the proximity, the source noticed that during the "brutal"
cross-examination of the witness, the INS official laughed when the testimony of
the witness contradicted her original documentation. On some occasions she
turned her face around to her friend, gesturing her pleasure at seeing the
witness having a hard time with the discrepancies in the document she had
written.
The source was under the impression that the INS did not have much interest
in prosecuting the Mederos case. And there is precedent for this type of
unbelievable behavior in the Miami INS office, such as during the 2001
discrimination and obstruction of justice trial involving a Cuban-American.
Evidence was presented by its own agents in the trial of Rick Ramirez vs.
Immigration and Naturalization Service in Miami.
Entered into evidence were photographs, taken inside the offices of the INS
in Miami during the Elian Gonzalez affair, that showed printed drink-can covers
and banners displaying derogatory graphics regarding the Cuban-American
community. This may have been done at taxpayer expense.
With the antecedent of animosity inside the INS, the source, following the
known attitude of the INS in Miami and the actions of the official at Mederos'
trial, questions the official's credibility, saying, "How do we know that
this INS official did not fabricate the report" the witness had to
overcome?
After all, it was the INS in Miami that granted Mederos residence status
and, later, U.S. citizenship. And it's where convicted Castro spy Mariano Faget
used to work.
On Aug. 1, 2002, after a 12-hour deliberation over the seven days of
testimony of 16 witnesses, the jury reached its verdict. Heriberto Mederos was
found guilty of lying to Miami's INS officers about his past, denying he
tortured political prisoners by administering electroshock treatments as a nurse
at the Mazorra Psychiatric Hospital in Havana.
On Oct. 16, Mederos will face a sentence of five years in prison and a
$250,000 fine, or deportation to Cuba.
Except in the local Miami press, little is known about Mederos' trial and
the horrid testimony of some of his surviving victims. As usual, the U.S. media
tried very hard to keep the American people ignorant about the cruel reality and
the deplorable state of human rights in Cuba, thus contributing to the prevalent
insensitivity to Cuban suffering.
Americans will hear nothing from Dan Rather or Peter Jennings nor see
anything on "60 Minutes," "20/20," "Dateline" or
any other television show about psychiatric abuse of political prisoners in
Castro's Cuba, even with many surviving victims living on U.S. soil. Americans
will not see a report about the book "The Politics of Psychiatry in
Revolutionary Cuba" by Charles J. Brown and Armando M. Lago.
This unchecked control and manipulation of information to satisfy the agenda
of a left-dominated media, far from helping the cause of freedom and democracy
in Cuba, is perpetuating Castro's tyranny. It is also fostering a profound
misunderstanding and division between Americans and Cuban-Americans.
How many Americans know who Heriberto Mederos was and what he did? Who were
his victims and why did they have to suffer?
The very compassionate Americans would most certainly care if they received
the information and the U.S. media makes an issue of it, as it normally does
with issues it wants the American people to care about.
But the media is not in the business of informing. It is in the business of
manipulating the American people.
© 2002 ABIP
Agustin Blazquez is producer/director of the
documentaries: COVERING CUBA, COVERING CUBA 2: The Next Generation, COVERING
CUBA 3: Elian (upcoming), and author with Carlos Wotzkow of the book COVERING
AND DISCOVERING. Translator with Jaums Sutton of the upcoming book by Luis Grave
de Peralta Morell, THE MAFIA OF HAVANA: The Cuban Cosa Nostra.
All Rights Reserved © NewsMax.com
Related information and links
On
Cuban Psychiatric Abuse / Armando M. Lago, PhD
Cuban
Psychiatry --- The Perversion of Medicine / Miguel A. Faria, Jr., MD
When they asked the doctor whether the patients
were heavily sedated, he replied, "Lobotomy did wonders for her condition",
and, "We are proud that in our institution, we have a larger proportion of
hospital inmates who have been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the
world." When one member loudly objected, he was silenced by a Castro
supporter, "We have to understand that there are differences between
capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies." -- Review of Ronald
Radosh 's book - MORE
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