Havana/The Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH) denounced the death of a 73-year-old inmate, Ulises Rodríguez Machado, this weekend, after receiving a beating at the hands of Daniel Primeyes, an officer in the Kilo 8 prison, in Camagüey. of internal order.
In a statement published this Monday, the organization, based in Madrid, explains that the prisoner was transferred to receive medical attention “when his condition was critical”, although it remains to be clarified “whether he was taken to the prison hospital or to the inmates of the Amalia Simoni Hospital, where the most serious cases are usually treated.” Other sources told the OCDH that the prison director, Juan Miguel Sánchez Duarte, “would have tried to hide the incident and the circumstances of the death.”
Likewise, the NGO contacted the family of Rodríguez Machado, who confirmed the death of the inmate but “chose not to provide further statements at this time.”
The NGO contacted the family of Rodríguez Machado, who confirmed the death of the inmate but “chose not to provide further statements at this time.”
This case, denounces the Observatory, “adds to a list of complaints about abuses and violence in the Cuban prison system, especially in the Kilo 8 prison, known for its inhumane conditions and mistreatment of inmates.”
It is not the first time, they also point out, that Daniel Primeyes appears as the “main aggressor” in complaints of mistreatment. One of them corresponds to the testimony of the director of the OCDH himself, Alejandro González Raga, who was imprisoned in the Kilo 7 prison in Camagüey and claims to have heard the then director of the center order: “Kill him, Primeyes, he cut me,” before that the official and other guards attacked inmate Roberto Esquivel González with metal bars and batons to the point of almost death.
“The actions of officers like Daniel Primeyes reflect not only acts of personal abuse, but a pattern of impunity and institutional complicity that allows these atrocities to occur behind the walls of Cuban prisons,” the organization claims. At the same time, he laments: “There is no type of mercy towards the prisoners, even if they are elderly.” And he asks the international community to “act in the face of this panorama of violence and repression.”
On the other hand, the Las Tunas activists Ana Ibis Tristá Padilla and Jarold Varona Agüero were acquitted of the alleged crime of “propaganda against the constitutional order,” of which they were accused months ago.
According to the CDPC registry, between January and mid-December 2024, a total of 49 Cuban prisoners had died.
The trial against both had been held last October and it was not until last Friday that the verdict was known. According to declared Trista Padilla Cuban Diaryboth were “acquitted due to lack of evidence” after being prosecuted for participating in the call in May 2023 for a peaceful protest in a park in Las Tunas that never took place.
At the end of last year, the Cuban Prison Documentation Center (CDPC) reported that at least seven prisoners they had died in the custody of Cuban authorities during November. According to the report, two of those deaths, that of political prisoner Manuel de Jesús Guillén Esplugas and that of Raúl Clejer Steris, were accompanied by complaints of violence.
According to the CDPC registry, between January and mid-December 2024, a total of 49 prisoners had died, four of them political prisoners detained for participating in the massive protests against the Government on July 11, 2021: Guillén Esplugas, Yosandri Mulet Almarales, Geraldo Díaz Alonso and Luis Barrios Díaz, who were between 29 and 36 years old.
