Havana Cuba. – From the maximum rigor Combinado del Este penitentiary, in the Havana municipality of Guanabacoa, the Colombian prisoner Arturo Sánchez Castaño denounces a general failure of the majority of the Own phone cardswhich despite having a balance have stopped working for at least two weeks.
Through a brief telephone conversation, Sánchez Castaño announced that the aforementioned situation affects both foreign and national inmates, and added that when trying to use the calling codes, different messages are heard indicating that the cards are not working. The prisoner also emphasized that so far ETECSA It has not ruled on the issue and the inmates are very concerned because they cannot communicate with their families.
In this sense, María Celia Aguilera García, mother of the 11J protester Luis Armando Cruz Aguilera, also a prisoner in the Combinado del Este, announced by telephone that she has not been able to communicate with her son for two weeks.
This circumstance was also reported by prisoners from other prison facilities throughout the Island, including the Kilo 5½ prisons in the Pinar del Río province, the Ariza prison in Cienfuegos, the Guantánamo provincial prison, the Típico prison in Manzanillo, in Granma, Kilo 8 in Camagüey and the Valle Grande and El Pitirre prisons in Havana, all of which are extremely rigorous.
For their part, two other inmates explained on condition of anonymity that only a few have been able to make calls using a few cards that have returned to work, in cases where their owners agree to rent them or exchange them for cigarettes or other items.
According to the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights, there are 293 prisons on the island. On the other hand, the 2021 Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights estimates the rate of persons deprived of liberty in the country at around 882 per 100,000 inhabitants. The only means of communication for these people with their families is through the Own service.
When inquiring about the matter at the ETECSA Customer Service number, three company operators limited themselves to reiterating that “the platform that supports the Own service is not working temporarily”, or that “the system is interrupted”, but without clarifying the causes.
They also added that repairs are being carried out to try to restore the service, although they stated that they did not know if it is a software problem or a broken piece of equipment. They also indicated that once the service was restored, users should recover the balance available before the interruption. Regarding the moment in which this would happen, they only answered that they await “a response from the specialists in charge of the repair.”
The Cuban Telecommunications Company (ETECSA) is the exclusive provider of all telephone services in the country. After a gradual transformation that began in 1994, the monopoly manages the island’s telecommunications without competition.
