Former Cuban political prisoner Basilio Guzmán Marrero, who served 22 years of confinement in the prisons of the island’s regime, died this Wednesday in Virginia, United States, a country where he had lived for years, as confirmed to 14ymedio dissident Frank Calzón.
Guzmán was a native of Campo Florido, Havana, and “joined the fight against the regime of Fulgencio Batista suffering persecution,” remembered the International Committee of Former Cuban Political Prisoners lamenting the death of the opponent.
“Years later, after the misnamed Castro revolution came to power, he returned to the struggle in search of the freedom that was being taken from the Cuban people,” adds the Committee, which also noted that Guzmán was tried in the 1990s. 1960 to 30 years in prison “of which he served 22, most of the time in underpants as his only clothing.”
The former prisoner not only became known for his confinement in jail but also for his position behind bars. According to Clazón, Guzmán was a man who from the beginning marked a kind of very clear red line in the Cuban political prison.
He was marked by the intransigence of not wearing the prison uniform, one of the characteristics of the so-called planted in Cuba and especially Guzmán who was known as “a key and very heroic figure for the confrontation in the prison system against Castroism,” added Calzón.
“Thank you friend for your example and dignity! From another dimension, Cuba will continue to count on you”
In the United States, he maintained an opposition profile against the island’s regime. “Basilio was the representative of the Alpha 66 organization in Washington, DC, where he lived. Our deepest condolences extend to his family,” the Committee concluded in its statement.
Basilio Guzmán Marrero was one of the signatories of a letter sent last April to the president of the United States, Joe Biden, by more than two hundred Cuban-American intellectuals, artists, writers and leaders asking the president to condition his policy towards Cuba on a “general amnesty for all political prisoners” on the island.
“A good man has died, a great patriot” who “well knew the hatred of Castro-communism”, wrote in his social networks the director of The Cuban American Voice, Julio M. Shiling. “Nothing, however, separated him from his balance, peace, and light.”
“Thank you friend for your example and dignity! From another dimension, Cuba will continue to count on you. Our deepest condolences to his family, friends and the entire community of the Cuban political prison,” added the writer and political scientist in his post.
The International Committee of Former Cuban Political Prisoners, reporting the death of Guzmán on its social networks, also lamented the death this Wednesday in the city of Los Angeles, California, of the dissident Evelio Díaz López.
Of Díaz, the Committee recalled that he was a member of a peasant family from Matanzas where he “stands out for the help he gave to the guerrillas of Benito Campos and Agapito Rivera” and his “participation in the fight against Castroism.”
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