HAVANA, Cuba. – The common prisoner Reinaldo Martínez Lemus, who denounced through a letter sent to CubaNet in November of last year the violation of his human rights and the lack of medical care in Havana prison 15-80 (known as El Pitirre), he had already died at the time this media received the letter and published his complaint.
The inmate had heart surgery and the prison authorities had refused to admit him to the National Hospital to receive another surgery, as revealed by the inmate himself in the letter.
On that occasion, Martínez Lemus expressed that instead of medical attention the only thing he had received was “psychological abuse.” “They have denied me that right since I’ve been here. I’m already swollen all the way down to my insides, and I’m short of breath every day, but they don’t even take us older adults out to sunbathe,” he said.
According to the testimony of prisoner Fabián Sarduy Pérez, Martínez Lemus died on November 8 around 8:00 am, although his body was not removed until 2:00 in the afternoon. “He had been feeling bad for several days, he was admitted, but the prison management never signed the driver’s license,” Sarduy Pérez revealed in a letter.
According to this inmate, on the day of his death, Martínez Lemus asked the Internal Order (OI) official known as “El Duque” to take him to the medical station and the officer responded that “he had just arrived and was not up to it.”
“Reinaldo got upset and said a few things to him and The Duke said: ‘Now for my f… I’m not going to take you anywhere’, and 25 minutes later Reinaldo died. And everything remains the same,” Sarduy Pérez stated in the letter.
In the letter he also denounces that the head of unit, Lexis Borrero Ramírez, the second head of unit, Reynaldo Parada, and the head of Internal Order, Yolexis Garlobo Naranjo, “are the most responsible” for the deaths that occur in prison “for not preventing them.”
In the same penitentiary center, common prisoner Ariel Cabrera died in November of last year, after suffering a heart attack.
Inmate Yoel Abad Beatón said in a letter that Cabrera was diagnosed at the prison medical station that he had a heart attack; However, they sent him to the detachment to wait for a car to arrive to take him to a hospital. By the time the vehicle arrived, it was too late.
“Ariel was not given due attention. All of us, the 1,227 prisoners in this concentration camp, run the risk of dying and no one pays us, everything goes unpunished. From October to date, three people have died as a result of poor medical care, mistreatment, hunger, lack of medicine,” Abad Beatón denounced in his writing.
“We do not have medications of any kind for immediate treatment, but we do have the famous carbamazepine, a drug authorized by the Management of this prison. It is in their best interest to have the prisoners drugged.’The chemist‘And the pills have turned this place into a narcoprison and no one cares,’ he added.
Likewise, he held “Lexis Borrero and his clique” responsible for the physical integrity of all the inmates.
According to a report from the Cuban Prisons Documentation Center, in the month of December, 87 events related to people deprived of liberty were recorded. “In total, violations were recorded in 30 categories of repressive incidents. The most recurrent were those linked to harassment or repression (43), poor living conditions in prison (17), denial of medical care (16), problems with food (13), restrictions on communication (12) and use of punishment cells (10),” the document detailed.
