My Cuba Libre Bringing Fidel Castro to Justice by Fowler III George J

Author:Fowler III, George J. [J., Fowler III, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780989715423
Publisher: Story Merchant Books
Published: 2013-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

CASTRO’S PRISONS

The Querella also detailed the horrors of Castro’s prisons. Wherever we could, we named the wardens so that their actions would never be forgotten. One of the more infamous prisons, Kilo 5.5, was under the direction of one Captain González, nicknamed El Ñato (means “flat nose”). The guards at Kilo 5.5 were famous for using sleep deprivation techniques, threatening family members, and extorting visitors. My mother-in-law, Mercedes Jenkins, experienced this treatment when trying to visit her husband in prison.

Kilo 7, in the province of Camaguey, was one of the more violent prisons. In 1974, political prisoners there protested their conditions by going on a hunger strike. Castro’s guards attacked, murdering forty helpless people. Perhaps the most famous prison was La Cabaña Fortress, a former Spanish fortress that had dungeons infested with rats. Over one hundred political prisoners were killed there in 1988.

At the G-2 prison of Santiago de Cuba, the cells were kept either at very high or very low temperatures. The prisoners were stripped of their clothes and thrown into isolation chambers. The guards would wake them every twenty minutes after they fell asleep. After a period of time, this torture caused them irreversible psychological damage.

Prisoners were stuffed in cells far beyond the space’s capacity. The punishment cells were particularly horrendous. The Foundation created true-to-life replicas of these cells, which I exhibited at the World Trade Center in New Orleans. People were shocked.

The guards altered the configuration of the cells depending upon the torture they wanted to inflict. Cells were kept very hot in summer and very cold in the winter, and there was never any concern for cleanliness or hygiene. Prison guards regularly withheld food, water, and medical assistance from their captives. In the prison of Boniato, many of the prisoners swelled up due to vitamin deficiencies before dying of hunger. Tío Alberto told me that excrement covered the floor in most of the cells where he was put.

After he was freed, Tío Alberto eventually became New Orleans’ Director of International Affairs. One night at the World Trade Center, a Cuban with a strong affinity for Castro (he is an agent who organizes trips to Cuba) told my uncle that Castro’s prisons were “quite adequate.” Tío Alberto decked him to the floor of the Plimsoll Club. It’s safe to say that he disagreed with this man’s assessment.

The Querella described certain cells called the tapiadas, which means “walled-in.” They are veritable tombs where the prisoners are kept for months in complete darkness. Some of the smallest are called “shelves” because the prisoner can neither lie down nor stand up. In the prison of Tres Macíos de Oriente, prisoners are kept in steel cages without water or toilets.

Political prisoners are frequently thrown together with the criminally and mentally ill. In order not to be assaulted or raped by psychopaths, political prisoners would sometimes scrub themselves with excrement. You might recall the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when Castro shipped thousands of Cuba’s common prisoners and lunatics from his insane asylums to the United States along with other exiles.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.