HOW MANY PRISONERS DOES Castro Hold?
Calzon, Frank
...A triumphant revolution has to use repression because with its triumph the class struggle does not end....We have no mercy for those who take weapons against us; it does not matter if they are...
...The New York Times estimated 40,000 back in 1967...
...He was restrained with difficulty by being reminded that the grazing would in fact encourage the plant growth...
...Boitel's case became a cause célèbre for the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, a group attached to the OAS, which had made appeals to the Cuban government since 1965 to save his life: ...In May 1972, the Commission was informed that Pedro Luis Boitel, still a prisoner in the El Principe Castle in Havana, was seriously ill as a result of maltreatment and torture to which he continued to be subjected...
...These brigades are composed for the most part of young people who for one reason or another have fallen into disgrace...
...Since then, the revolutionary leadership has tightened its controls, prohibiting the peasants from slaughtering their animals and requiring that their crops be sold to the government...
...The units became a catchall for homosexuals and other undesirables and in fact functioned as prison camps...
...A letter from a former Cuban political prisoner, printed by the Washington Post on July 8, 1975, stated that there was a group of women political prisoners on a hunger strike at the America Libre (Free Americas) Prison Farm, Wajay, Havana...
...In mid-1965 Premier Castro acknowledged that there were close to 20,000 political prisoners in Cuba...
...And of course we had to defecate squatting over a hole with only the privacy that the darkness of the cell provided...
...The postPadilla period has been marked by the imprisonment of a growing number of younger intellectuals and the subsequent clandestine publication of a Cuban version of samizdat...
...The application of government labor decrees has also contributed to the number of politically oriented "crimes" in Cuba...
...In Havana alone there are eight "fronts...
...over 350 of these, suffering from serious ailments, particularly tuberculosis, are deprived of medical care...
...Although not a homogeneous group, the political prisoners are a different sort than the grizzled old reactionaries often stereotyped in pro-Castro literature—prisoners range from Fidel's former comrades in the 26th of July Movement to young peasants who were infants when Castro took over...
...Prisoners are used for many construction projects, doing many hours of "voluntary work" in the hope of an early release...
...The IRC also explained that "what is most appalling in the case of Cuba's political prisoners is the unconscionable length of incarceration...
...One surprising fact is the high percentage of young men and men of rural backgrounds among the prisoners...
...One final aspect of the prison problem is a result of the intellectual policy of the regime...
...Estimates of the number of prisoners are difficult to obtain and the Cuban government is reticent to release such figures or allow international organizations to visit its prisons...
...Rene Dumont in Is Cuba Socialist...
...it does not matter if they are weapons of destruction or ideological weapons...
...and the Washington Post published a 25,000 to 50,000 estimate on June 1, 1975...
...Professor Edward Gonzalez, an American scholar at UCLA who also has visited Cuba, reported in 1974 that there were between 25,000 and 80,000...
...When he went on a hunger strike to protest, he was transferred to a security cell and told "this time we will let you die, no doctors...
...In 1967 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported that the treatment they receive, in addition to being inhuman, violates all pertinent treaties...
...Once over his rage, he agreed to have the sentence changed to 15 years on a prison farm...
...The Post cited the case of Oracio Giordano Orta Gomez, who managed to send to his brother a handwritten copy of his sentence extension, which, the document explains, is a result of his "postcriminal dangerousness" and a type of preventive detention...
...In the May–June 1970 Dissent appeared an appeal to the United Nations by 47 prisoners at La Cabana Fortress, in which they wrote of murders, beatings, mental torture, and human experiments...
...He has been the victim of countless abuses and humiliations...
...Last April prison officials damaged his spine during beatings, besides inflicting bayonet wounds...
...Last March the Journal de Geneve reported some 50,000 "political" prisoners...
...Matos had been sentenced to 20 years in 1959 for resigning his commission and writing to Castro, warning of a Communist takeover of the Revolution...
...The International Rescue Committee in a statement presented at a congressional hearing last summer pointed out that women prisoners who have refused to submit to reeducation were being held at Farm "El Nuevo Amane242 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS cer" (New Dawn) at Punta Brava in Havana...
...David Salvador, one-time leader of the Camaguey sugar workers and secretary-general of the CTC (Confederation of Cuban Workers) for the first year of the revolution, has not been heard of since his arrest on November 5, 1960...
...some have given birth in their prison cells, and several have died of hemorrhages and infections...
...Lee Lockwood, not unsympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and author of Castro's Cuba, Cuba's Fidel, indicated that the number "was still 240 COMMENTS AND OPINIONS growing...
...and Doris Delgado and Mercedes Pena at the Boniato Prison in Oriente...
...Cuban intellectuals are free to write as long as they remain subservient to the Revolution...
...They had been transferred from La Cabana Prison, and "at least two of them, Doris Delgado and Ana Lazara Rodriguez, need medical attention...
...Those unaware of your beards' mythology who have not seen the death rays flowing from your rifles...
...Whether it be poets or peasants, idealistic revolutionaries or iconoclastic youths, the prisons and work camps of Cuba will probably continue to add to their number as long as the wishes of large sections of the population are ignored...
...Homosexuals received early attention during the mid-1960s with the creation of special units, at one time called UMAP (Military Units for Aid to Production) that, according to Jose Yglesias in the New York Review of Books (June 3, 1971), were created ...to include only young men of draft age whose moral outlook did not in the eye of the authorities make them fit for regular military duty...
...The government also has introduced the "worker's biography," a type of labor passport that records a worker's behavior, attitudes, and production quotas...
...According to the new sentence, passed by an administrative court, Gomez "had been in punishment cells at various times" for refusing to wear the blue uniform of the rehabilitation plan (a program that sometimes entails attending political indoctrination classes) and for participating in hunger strikes...
...He has been kept incommunicado for periods of more than one year...
...Regimentation of the union movement caused resistance among workers and produced a spate of political prisoners over the last 15 years...
...Most are serving terms ranging from two to twenty years...
...Groups who in another context might not be considered "political prisoners," but who have been singled out by official policy as threats to the Revolution, are members of Jehovah's Witnesses and other minor religious sects, and homosexuals...
...The continuing imprisonment of homosexuals— now in regular camps—cannot be excused, as some have attempted to do in the U.S., by blaming the "machismo mentality...
...Because he refused to accept a program of indoctrination he was forced to live completely nude for two years...
...Boitel died in prison, without receiving medical attention, while his fellow prisoners rioted, burning their mattresses in a futile attempt to save his life...
...In a statement this past summer, the respected International Rescue Committee pointed out that "Conditions in the prisons have been described as dismal and worse...
...Maria Luisa Matos to the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations in Geneva last March, her husband ...was condemned to 20 years in prison because he disagreed ideologically with the leader of the ruling government in Cuba...
...Other underground poems have been written by men and women too young to have participated in the revolutionary movement of the late 1950s: Beware of those who grow in obscurity and carry worlds underneath their eyelids...
...the repressive system that Stalinism imposed in the socialist countries...
...According to a document presented by Mrs...
...A particularly painful issue is the plight of women in prison...
...He weighed 70 pounds at death...
...Besides the "maximum security prisons" there are dozens of other establishments, including prison farms and work camps...
...This document is to be kept for every worker at his work place and required for any job transfer...
...mentioned one such case: A young sentinel guarding some new rice plantings had one night let cows graze amidst them, and Castro wanted to have him shot...
...The Cuban cultural scene can be divided into a pre-Padilla and a post-Padilla period...
...all such manifestations are to be firmly rejected...
...In calls to the United States, his mother, Mrs...
...Since then the UMAP camps have been abolished, perhaps because of their exposure in the foreign press, but the official policy remains as enunciated in Granma, the official organ of the Cuban Communist party on May 9, 1971: "...the pathological character of homosexual deviations was recognized...
...On May 28, the Commission received a communication informing it that he had died in prison...
...The Washington Post also mentioned the case of former student leader Pedro Luis Boitel, a leader in the underground against the Batista dictatorship and an opponent of Castro's takeover of the University of Havana...
...Most of them either were dealt with by firing squads or fled the island immediately after the collapse of the old regime...
...Many women who have refused to be reeducated are victims of the Cuban version of Gulag Archipelago, among them as of January of 1975 were Clara Alonso, Maria M. Alvarez, Zoila Aguila, Albertina O'Farril at El Nuevo Amanecer, Miriam Ortega, Bertha Aleman and Esther Campos at Havana...
...Ironically, these very units have built many of the revolutionary "showcases" displayed on guided tours of the island...
...The fact is that in spite of social pressures, before the Revolution there was never a systematic massive repression of homosexuals in Cuba...
...The Witnesses were denounced at the First National Congress on Education and Culture (1971), and the year before last they were finally declared illegal and their churches closed...
...Relatively few figures of the old Batista regime are still in jail...
...Ernesto Guevara, El Mundo (Havana), October 1,1963 Among those who have studied the Cuban revolution, few have focused on the tens of thousands of people in prison for "political crimes...
...The situation, however, was somewhat fluid until 1971, when a more strict cultural policy began to be enforced with the arrest and recantation of the poet Heberto Padilla (see Dissent, Spring 73...
...Each new government program, decreed from above and without an opportunity for free discussion among the people, has brought in its wake a new influx into Cuba's political prisons...
...In 1973 Amnesty International reported that Cuba was engaging in systematic torture in a pamphlet on the worldwide "torture epidemic...
...Other estimates fluctuate around the 50,000 figure...
...Clara Abrahantes viuda de Boitel, who had also wired Pope Paul begging him to intercede, sought help from the International Red Cross and other world organizations...
...In 1967 Lee Lockwood, in his very favorable account of the Revolution, pointed out that "...the majority of the internees are not, as one might assume, men of urban backgrounds, but `campesinos,'peasants from the mountains and the outlying rural areas...
...Since 1970 the regime has enacted a series of decrees punishing "absenteeism" and "loafing...
...in spite of the fact that counterrevolutionary activity has been slackening gradually since the Missile Crisis...
...Although initially the revolution had the support of the rural population, in the early '60s, when the government reneged on its word "to give land to the toilers," the regime began to have difficulty in enforcing its collectivization policies...
...he was buried in secret...
...REPORTS on widespread use of torture in Cuban prisons have appeared ever since the consolidation of the Castro regime...
...Beware of those who did not see you make the earth, nor distribute worlds, or punish angels...
...Padilla's imprisonment for writing "counterrevolutionary poetry" and his confession prompted a group of intellectuals including, Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre, Octavio Paz, Alberto Moravia, and Simone de Beauvoir, to write to Fidel Castro expressing their "shame and anger" and begging Castro "to spare Cuba...
...I was one of 11 prisoners who were held naked in a locked cell with no lights and in a space of 8 hand-breaths by 12 hand-breaths, for a week before we took this decision...
...Lack of food, lack of water, lack of medical attention, lack of space, and brutal treatment have frequently been reported...
...Enough information has filtered out from the island, so that the International Rescue Committee, the International League for the Rights of Man, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and Amnesty International have been able to assess the situation...
...In June 1971 Paris Match reported that the Cuban government was using "gavetas" or lockers, cells two feet wide, six feet long, COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 241 and seven feet high, in each of which are held three prisoners...
...In La Cabana Fortress, Miguel Sales, a 24-year-old poet, has written about the creation of "a new socialist man...
...q COMMENTS AND OPINIONS 243...
...that same year Marino de Medici, an Italian journalist who visited the island, wrote that there were 50,000 in the regular political prisons, and an additional 80,000 in "work camps...
...And in March of 1975 this London-based organization began a campaign, calling on its members to write to Fidel Castro in support of Huber Matos, a former leader of the 26th of July Movement and provincial commander in Castro's rebel army...
...In answer to this last charge, Gomez wrote in a letter smuggled out of prison: ...Only on one occasion did I participate for two days in a hunger strike...
...The Washington Post reported last June that letters from prisoners received in this country charged that "some Cuban political prisoners who have completed their terms have been `resentenced' without ever leaving custody...
...In every province there are also the "open fronts," composed of traveling brigades...
...In February of 1970 he was isolated in a dark cell with a small window covered with a heavy cloth, sewn to the bars...
...According to Sales: "through the streets of my old Havana, has never walked this new man...
...About this same case, the National Catholic News Service reported that ...He was beaten, tortured with bayonets and denied food and medical attention...
...I do not know if that situation persists since for the past five years he has not been allowed to receive visitors...
...The Cuban prison system is a source of forced labor along the Stalinist model...
...They are kept in separate camps in order to prevent them from proselytizing among other prisoners...
...None of his friends or fellow prisoners was permitted to attend Boitel's funeral...
Vol. 23 • July 1976 • No. 3
