The political prisoner Ernesto Borges Pérez has been awarded with the Patmos 2021 prize, awarded by the institute of the same name to committed Cuban Christians. “It fulfills the fundamental requirement: to be consistent with your faith”, said daily The debate Baptist pastor Mario Félix Lleonart Barroso, general coordinator of the Institute.
One of the reasons for the award, explained the priest, is that the case of the former Cuban intelligence officer, sentenced in 1998 to 30 years in prison for espionage for the United States, does not lose “visibility”. The plaque was awarded to Borges’s father a few days ago.
In 1998, Borges Pérez was captain of the Counterintelligence Directorate of the Interior Ministry and compiled a list of twenty-six Cuban spies who were preparing to enter the United States. In July of that same year, when he was going to deliver the information to officials of the United States Interests Office in Havana, he was arrested.
He was accused then for the crime of espionage and in 1998 a military court sentenced him to 30 years of deprivation of liberty, after having commuted his death sentence, then Borges was 32 years old.
The Baptist pastor Lleonart, who was able to visit Borges in prison seven ago, confirmed the prison pass received in 2020 as one of the few benefits of the prisoner, in addition to presenting vision problems due to being kept in dark cells. He must have surgery, but he refuses to do it while in prison due to the threats he has suffered.
Raúl, Borges’ father, warned that despite his severity, the former Cuban intelligence officer has “very high morale.” He mentioned that the authorities have denied Borges Pérez the possibility of accessing conditional freedom after serving a third of his sentence, a right that he can request as a military man.
In 1998, Borges Pérez was captain of the Counterintelligence Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior and compiled a list of twenty-six Cuban spies who were preparing to enter the United States.
Although they have made to Borges in the last two years ten “proposals to release him in exchange for him to become a collaborator of the organs of State Security”, but “dignity and principles are not negotiated”, declared Raúl to Cubanet.
In the search for ways to achieve the release of the political prisoner, Borges’ father has raised the possibility of exchanging him for Ana Belén Montes, a former official of the United States Defense Intelligence Agency convicted of espionage and considered “a prisoner of conscience “for the Government of Havana.
Montes was arrested in September 2001 in Washington and sentenced to 25 years in prison and found guilty by a court in this country of the crime of passing information to Cuban intelligence. Since then, he has served 25 years in prison.
Borges, who has spent 23 years of his life in prison, has been in the Combinado del Este, Havana prison, since 2011, under the regime of least severity. This measure changed on July 7, when he was punished for making a phone call to his family informing that an inmate in his cubicle had positive for covid-19, according to made it known Radio Television Martí.
In previous editions, the Patmos Prize has gone to Eduardo Cardet Concepcion, national coordinator of the Christian Liberation Movement, the opposition Oscar Elías Biscet, the priest José Conrado Rodríguez, the director of the Center for Coexistence Studies, Dagoberto Valdés, and Professor Amador Blanco Hernández.
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