|
In Cuba's prisons
By Doug Ireland, ILCA Associate
Member. ILCA
Online, January 3, 2005.
Today's
Le Monde has an interview from Havana
with two political prisoners just released
from Fidel Castro's jails, in which they
recount the sadistic, inhumane treatment
meted out to dissenters from Fidelismo and
to ordinary law violators.
Voltaire's famous dictum, that one should
judge a society by the quality of its prisons,
leads to a severe judgment about the Cuban
dictatorship if one reads these two testimonies.
Jorge Olivera, 43, was a Cuban TV commentator
before quitting to work for an independent
Internet press service--journalism that
put him in prison. First, he was the target
of one of Fidelismo's organized neighborhood
lynchings, the repudio. Organized by the
political police, the repudio consists of
stone-throwing, name-calling near-riots,
all designed to make a dissident collapse
and recant his thought crimes. (Olivera
was forced to move and had his marriage
destroyed after one such campaign). Thrown
in jail in 2003, he was crammed into a tiny
cell with 18 other common-law prisoners,
many of them dangerous murderers and drug
dealers with psychological disorders (a
co-habitation that is in itself a sadistically
refined extra punishment), all forced to
use a common toilet--which consisted of
a hole in the floor. The food, deliberately
rotten and containing little nourishment,
is also designed to break down a prisoner
physically and psychologically.
Manuel Vazquez Portal, 53, a poet and writer
for the government-run cultural press for
a decade, during which he won three official
prizes before being purged, is described
by the Le Monde journalist who talked to
him as having the face of a man who has
"passed through hell." That hell
has a name: the notorious prison of Boniato,
not far from Santiago de Cuba--it is the
same, dilapidated 60-year-old prison in
which Castro himself was incarcerated after
his famous 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks.
Vazquez Portal compares his 15 months in
Boniato prison as "like living in a
barracks latrine, or a pigsty"--subhuman
conditions, inedible rotten food, water-logged
cells in which the numerous leaks are never
repaired and the floors are covered in the
rancid, infectious liquid overflow from
other cells. Three months of his sentence
were spent in total, terrifying isolation.
There are some 600 political prisoners
still languishing in these horrific conditions.
Vazquez Portal, whose health was broken
by his imprisonment, says that "there
are are many still in jail whose health
is worse than mine. Only some of the better-known
prisoners were released to try to bring
down the level of international pression
for the release of them all," notably
by the European Union. Both he and Olivera
were released provisionally, and live under
the threat of being returned to prison at
any moment on the whims of the political
police. And, he adds, even though he is
now out of jail, "I do not feel free,
because no Cuban is free." To read
the entire, heart-rending Le Monde interview
with these two victims of the Castro dictatorship,
click here.
I have always opposed the U.S. blockade
of Cuba. In a statement against repression
in Cuba, released last year by the Campaign
for Peace and Democracy and signed by a
hundred left-wing, anti-war American intellectuals
(including myself), we affirmed: "The
Cuban government's violations of democratic
rights do not justify sanctions or any other
form of intervention by the United States
in Cuba. The government of the United States
- which employs the rhetoric of human rights
when doing so promotes its imperial goals,
but maintains a discreet silence or makes
only token protests when U.S. allies are
involved, and which fully supports the barbaric
practice of capital punishment, routinely
inflicted in the U.S. - is hardly in a position
to preach democracy and human rights."
That said, there is no excuse for those
on the left who claim to be progressives
or democrats turning a blind eye to the
realities of the liberticide Cuban regime.
And the New Year seems an appropriate time
to recall the plight of those Fidel has
thrown in jail for daring to think differently
than he.
Making Labor Media a Force
to Be Reckoned With
International Labor Communications Association,
AFL-CIO / CLC
888 16th St. NW Suite 630
Washington, D.C. 20006
Phone 202-974-8039, Email ilca@aflcio.org
|
