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CUBAN
PRISONS
A real life story
By Iliana Curra Lussón.
Translated by: Robert A. Solera. La
Nueva Cuba, october 21, 2003.
 Next
October 23 Julio César Morales González,
will be barely 33 years old. Also approximately
on that date it will be 10 years since his
unjust incarceration and physical and mental
tortures. His biggest crime: to dissent
from a system that wished to create "the
new man", a failed experiment as their
methods are failed.
Julito, as his prison brothers call him,
has been subjected to brutal beatings and
total isolation in punishment cells. He
has been also subjected to psychotropic
substances.
Julito has been denied going out in the
sun for years, his family visits suspended.
He also has been denied adequate treatment
for his illnesses. He has participated in
multiple hunger strikes, and he has forever
been made suffer from a mental disequilibrium
as a consequence of all those tortures.
But it all does not end there. Julito has
been threatened to be injured in a beastly
way.
His mother has also been threatened at
her home but prison authorities did not
pay any attention to her denouncing. Anonymous
letters let him know that. He has also been
without receiving any medicine for his nervous
problems for 6 months with the goal in mind
of totally destabilizing him, but his entire
mother's denouncing to the National Direction
of Jails and Prisons were in vain. Already
orders had been given and the plan detailed
without scruples.
Taking advantage of his deteriorated mental
state, he received harmful substances in
his jail cell to placate his nervous unbalance.
Everything was prepared with a cruelty without
boundaries until he was sexually assaulted
and raped in December last year by delinquents
that sell themselves out for an additional
visit or a conjugal pavilion.
His mother visited him on January 6 and
only then she knew everything. Her son had
been raped and left lying in his jail bunker
for three days without any medical assistance,
without allowing him to be seen by her.
His mother also never was on notice of what
had happened.
"I denounced it publicly in November
last year that common criminals in prison
had threatened to kill my son, and also
me. In their letters they said that they
would square things up with him in jail,
and would take reprisals against me outside
the prison,' his mother stated. The same
authorities that promoted this cruelty never
listened to her denunciations.
The pain suffered by a mother does not
compare to anything when she gets to know
of such a horrible thing: "I came back
home like a lunatic", she said to a
radio station in Miami, denouncing it.
Her complaints to the National Direction
of Jails and Prisons in Havana never got
an answer. The prison guards say they knew
about the rape, but that they could not
punish anybody because they did not know
whom the authors were.
After several days in the prison infirmary
they transferred him to another jail, but
later on they returned him to the same place
and locked him up in a punishment cell in
a very bad state of health. The mission
had been accomplished already. Cuba's State
Security demonstrated once more its sadistic
and irrational treatment of political prisoners.
"My son is not a person that loses
his mind, but he shows his nervous problems
in his eyes and in his hands that tremble
a lot", explains his mother. Julito's
eyes are a deep blue, out of its sockets
of so much horror that he has been forced
to suffer during his incarceration.
I met him in 1995. We coincided during
a transfer to a hospital in Camagüey.
A paddy wagon from maximum-security prison
Kilo-8 brought some prisoners. In the outside
of the paddy wagon we were introduced; we
were three women prisoners. Several guard
both males and females were guarding the
wagon. Next to a metallic gate almost closed
there was a very young malnourished boy.
His skin was extremely white, a skin that
had been without getting any sun for a long
time, his deep light blue eyes looking at
me: it was Julito.
He asked for my name and we identified
with each other. Our greeting was touching
just the tip of our fingers between the
iron-bar gate, slightly a brush to identify
ourselves like brothers in the struggle
and of incarceration. His words against
the Tyrant did not wait long, and I realized
that he was altered or better said: they
had him altered. Later on I wrote a "picúa"
(a clandestine letter) to Jorge Luis García
Pérez (Antúnez). I told him
what had happened and he answered explaining
the conditions in which they had Julito,
and how all that had affected him. I have
never been able to forget his eyes in that
encounter, lesser since I knew all they
had done to him.
My purpose to denounce what happens in
Cuba, particularly to the political prisoners,
has gained strength. I have seen and listened
to the political prison horrors, but never
something so haunting that is even further
than one's own death. Is living death, an
eternal trauma, a difficult to heal wound.
It is a young life condemned to the pain
of its tortures.
Those that commit those savageries do not
deserve any pardon, much less those that
order them.
"Another thing that I want to make
clear in this denouncing, is that my son
would never take his own life by his hand,
because for a long time they have been trying
to make believe that he wants to commit
suicide and it is not true", said his
mother from Holguín. "It is
the last thing they could do to him, there
would not be anything else. The only thing
I hope for is that public opinion, the media
and the civilized world know that they torture
in Cuba, and that it has been a practice
since 1959 when the communists took power.
Julio César Morales is a sample of
that, but they have never been able to break
him; he still is a dignified example of
a youth that does not accept tyranny, neither
compromises, nor agreements with the same
opprobrious regime that continuously retaliate
against them.
"I do not ask for his release, I demand
that him be freed… he has been for
a too long time in prison", said Julito's
desperate mother from Cuba, and that is
what we all must demand: freedom for Julio
César Morales González and
also that of all political prisoners.
This is not a fictitious story, it is so
real and sorrowful as this young man has
lived through, a boy born within that so-called
revolution. He has lived to tell it, and
I hope he stays alive so that in a not too
far future he can get adequate treatment
for his nerves and to alleviate his ills.
God willing it will be soon and in liberty.
Copyright © 1997-2003
- LA NUEVA CUBA - All Rights Reserved.
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