HAVANA, Cuba.- For the first time in a decade, government spokesman Humberto López showed the inside of some Cuban prisons as part of a tour that aims to show the supposed benevolence of the Cuban prison system, educational programs and social reintegration.
Through photos and videos published on his Facebook profile, the also member of the Central Committee of the PCC showed some areas of the Combinado del Este prison and a prison camp for minors under 21 years of age in San Francisco de Paula, both located in Havana. .
In a live broadcast, he toured the camp for minors, the classrooms where they not only receive basic subjects but also social re-education and indoctrination programs, the medical center where, according to the nurses, they lack nothing -despite to the fact that throughout the country there are shortages of medicines and medical supplies-, the library and the dormitories.
The entire visit was guided by some young interns, who gave explanations, showed how the place worked and told how happy they were, “this looks like a school in the countryside,” they said.
Despite the effort, the staging was evident and many things were forced, such as when they ask the young people who were in the library what they were reading and they did not know how to answer, the librarian had to intervene to explain and save the situation.
In the end, López asked them if they were forced to do something or tortured, and as expected, the answer was negative. For those who are aware of the coercion to which prisoners are subjected, it is evident that if they answered otherwise, they could lose their permission to go abroad, family visits, phone calls or some other prison benefit.
“New shirts, just taken out of the warehouse for the visit, you only have to have a family member in that situation to know the reality of things, not what they want you to see,” the user reacted Yohanlys Fernandez Regalado.
For its part, Magda Moreno He said: “Well, whoever believes that needs income. Everything is perfect, to behave badly so that they intern us all”.
The highest rate in the world of people confined
It was in 2012 the last time that the Cuban regime allowed the foreign press accredited on the Island to enter the prisons on a guided tour. Since then, the little information has only been compiled by independent organizations, since Cuba is one of the few countries in the Western Hemisphere that rejects any form of independent scrutiny of prison establishments, and there is no transparency on the part of the Cuban authorities in this regard.
By the end of 1958 in Cuba there were between 10 and 14 prisons. Sixty-three years later, according to the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH), there are 293 penitentiary centers divided according to their regime of severity, less and greater rigor or correctional.
“Today Cuba, with just over 11 million inhabitants, has five more prisons than Mexico, the third largest country in Latin America and with a population 12 times greater. If we compare the Cuban figures with Belgium, which has an almost identical population (11.4 million), there are only 35 prisons in the European nation, 258 less than in the largest Caribbean island”, revealed CubaNet recently through a report.
For its part, the World Prison Brief, a database from the University of London, although it handles figures from 2012, places Cuba in fifth place in the world in terms of prison population in proportion to its inhabitants.
“However, if we calculate the prison population based on data collected in 2020 by Prisoners Defenders (PD), who assure that there are more than 90,000 people in Cuban prisons, the result is even more alarming. If so, the island would have the highest rate of people incarcerated in the entire planet, above the United States.”
In Cuba they torture
The visit to the penitentiary establishments carried out by Humberto López occurs just when the terrible conditions, torture and mistreatment of Cuban political prisoners have been denounced at the United Nations. PD presented before the Committee against Torture 101 testimonies of Cuban political prisoners, in which he identified 15 patterns of torture and mistreatment.
Similarly, the imprisonment of minors after the protests of July 11 (J11) last year was exposed and analyzed both in the Committee against Torture and in the Committee on the Rights of the Child of the UN, which met recently . Currently, PD registers at least 1,015 political prisoners on the Island, most of them after 11J.
“In addition, the Committee Against Torture issued its periodic report with recommendations to Cuba. This means that during the last two weeks the Cuban state has been subject to very serious reviews that have not been carried out for several years. Minors deprived of liberty are a key issue on which each of these groups of international experts demanded precise and disaggregated information,” said the Cuban journalist and member of the Justice 11J working group, Darcy Borrero Batista.
This Wednesday the Article 19 platform, defender of freedom of expression and the right to information, along with other organizations from Cuba and the rest of the continent, reviewed to the cases of torture and abuse against dissidents, common prisoners and politicians on the island, going so far as to affirm that “in Cuba torture is indeed practiced.”
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