II. Illustrative Cases

 

Ramón Velásquez Toranzo [1]

Ramón Velásquez Toranzo set out on his march on December 10, 2006—International Human Rights Day. With him were his wife, Bárbara, and their 18-year-old daughter, Rufina. Each of them carried a sign. The signs read: “respect for human rights,” “freedom for political prisoners,” and “no more repression against the peaceful opposition.” Their goal was to walk the entire length of the island of Cuba, from east to west.

They marched silently. At night, they slept on the sides of roads, in bus stops, or in the homes of people who took them in. After a few days, security officers began trailing them. On the outskirts of Holguín, a group affiliated with the government known as a “rapid response brigade” surrounded them with bats and metal rods. They called Velásquez and his family “mercenaries” and “whores,” and threatened to rape Bárbara and Rufina. Police looked on and did nothing.

Security officials arrested the family as they walked through Holguín. Velásquez was thrown in jail, while his wife and daughter were forcibly returned to their home in Las Tunas. When Velásquez was released four days later, they continued to march west. Twice, cars tried to run them over, and they had to dive off the road to avoid being hit. More brigades taunted them. Security officers threatened them. Still, they kept marching.

They reached Camagüey on January 19, 2007, and were arrested again. Velásquez was held for four days and then taken to a municipal court. That he had not committed a crime did not matter; under Cuba’s “dangerousness” law, individuals can be imprisoned simply when courts determine they are likely to commit a crime in the future.

The state’s only evidence against him was a series of “official warnings” (advertencias oficiales) for being unemployed—issued while he was on his march—which he had never seen before. His lawyer, whom he met five minutes before the trial, defended him vigorously at the outset of the hearing. Then, the judge called a recess and invited the defense lawyer to his quarters. When the lawyer returned, she stopped defending Velásquez and did not speak for the rest of the trial.

The trial lasted less than an hour, and the judge sentenced Velásquez to three years in jail. He was bused to a prison, stripped down to his underwear, and thrown into a solitary confinement cell. The tiny space had no bed—only a concrete floor that flooded with water every time it rained. When his family brought him food to supplement the meager prison rations, guards repeatedly left it outside his cell to rot.

His wife, Bárbara, fell into a deep depression following his incarceration, not leaving her bed for weeks, while his son, René, was fired from his job without warning. His daughter Rufina, who continued to monitor human rights and report on abuses, was subjected to constant surveillance. Authorities warned her that she would suffer the same fate as her father if she did not change her behavior. She eventually fled to the United States, where she lives today.  

As of November 2009, Velásquez was still serving out his sentence.

Alexander Santos Hernández [2]

Alexander Santos Hernández was first put on trial for his political activities in November 2004. He was working on the Varela Project, a peaceful campaign to gather signatures from Cuban citizens calling for democratic change, and had hosted open meetings in his home in Gibara, Holguín, to discuss the project. One day, as he was leaving a gathering, a police officer told him to come by the station for questioning. When he failed to report to the station, he was sentenced to six months of forced labor for “disobedience to authority.” He was 29 years old.

When Santos completed his sentence, he resumed his participation in nonviolent political activities. He joined two small political groups not recognized by the government (and thus illegal)—the Cuban Liberal Movement and the Eastern Democratic Alliance. Both were dedicated to promoting political change and respect for basic rights in Cuba. He attended meetings, voiced criticism of the government, and documented abuses by government officials.

As a result, Santos was subject to myriad forms of repression. In 2005, his boss fired him from his job as a martial arts instructor. When Santos went to the state employment center, an official there told him that “worms do not deserve employment.” Santos was the target of six public acts of repudiation from 2005 to 2006. Groups of pro-government civilians gathered outside his home and insulted him, calling him a “mercenary” and a “traitor.” More than once, they broke down his door and ransacked a collection of books on democracy and other “subversive” topics that he maintained as a free library.

In June 2006, Santos was attacked in the street by a “rapid response brigade,” a group designed to protect the government against threats from “counterrevolutionaries.” Without provocation, eight men from the brigade beat Santos severely, he later told Human Rights Watch. The group was led by a major in the police force, whom Santos knew from having been detained several times. The major told Santos that the next time he saw him riding his motorcycle, he was going to run him over.

On July 5, 2006, police arrested Santos in his home. According to Santos, “[The police] picked me up at 5:50AM while I was at home sleeping, and by 8:30 that morning they were already reading me my sentence.” He was taken to the Municipal Court of Gibara, where he was charged with “dangerousness.”

Santos was not appointed a lawyer, and his family was not notified of the hearing. The trial, which lasted between 15 and 20 minutes, was completely closed to the public. According to Santos, the prosecutor’s only argument was that he was a “dissident,” which constituted a danger to society. The judge sentenced him to four years in prison for “dangerousness.” Santos said the sentence itself, which he was allowed to read, was dated July 3, 2006—two days before his trial. Santos’s family was notified about the decision after it had been issued. His mother hired a lawyer to appeal his case, but the Provincial Court of Holguín upheld Santos’s sentence.

Santos was sent to Cuba Sí! prison in Holguín, where he said was put in a cell with dozens of prisoners convicted of violent crimes. His cellmates were serving between 20 and 60 years, while Santos was serving four. The food he was given was inadequate and rotten, and he quickly developed health problems, including serious stomach ailments and painful pustules on his face. Despite his repeated requests, authorities would not allow him to see a doctor. As a result, he went on hunger strike to demand medical attention. He did not eat for 23 days, until he was finally granted a doctor’s visit.

Santos witnessed beatings of fellow political prisoners in prison. The most severe was in February 2007, when journalist Víctor Rolando Arroyo Carmona—one of 75 individuals arrested in a massive crackdown in 2003—tried to carry some of his leftover lunch out of the dining hall. Arroyo, who was 55 at the time, was suffering digestive problems and had been given permission by authorities to finish eating his food in his cell. Santos watched a prison guard stop Arroyo and ask him where he was going with the food. When Arroyo answered and kept walking, the guard punched him in the back of the head, knocking him to the ground, and beat him while he was on the floor. Santos said the officer punched Arroyo several times in the face and the body, shattering his glasses.

In 2008, renowned Cuban singer Silvio Rodríguez gave a series of concerts in Cuba’s prisons. In the days before he came to Cuba Sí! prison, Santos said, officials rounded up all of the political prisoners and gay prisoners and moved them to another facility.

Santos was released on parole in December 2008. He said a plainclothes police officer was permanently stationed outside of his house, and anyone who visited him was threatened. Authorities told one of Santos’s oldest friends that if she continued to visit him, they would expel her daughter from school. She has since stopped coming to see him.

Santos was given a short contract as a bricklayer when he was released, but he told Human Rights Watch that he since had difficulty finding a job because of his reputation as a dissident. He worried the authorities would revoke his parole for being unemployed, which is considered a form of “antisocial behavior” under the “dangerousness” provision.

“Jorge Barrera Alonso” [3]

Jorge Barrera Alonso had been working in a comedor obrero, or state-run workplace cafeteria, when one day his boss fired him with no advance warning, saying he was “not suited” for the job. Shortly before his dismissal, Barrera had started attending the meetings of an unauthorized political group that is critical of the Cuban government. He spent weeks looking for a new job, but was repeatedly turned away. Unable to find work, he took a job working for a vegetable seller who lacked official government authorization, and thus was considered illegal.

Barrera continued to attend meetings of the unofficial group and began participating in public activities raising awareness about political rights. In 2006, he and a friend were distributing copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the street. Police arrived, arresting Barrera. His friend managed to escape and called Barrera’s wife, “Hilda Galán,”[4] to tell her about his arrest. Galán went to every police station in the city looking for her husband, but all of the officials she spoke to alleged they had not heard of him. Galán then went to file a report with a municipal complaints office that her husband had disappeared after being arrested by the police. She later received a call from one of the stations she had visited, saying that Barrera was in their custody.

Barrera spent five days in police detention, during which he was allowed one 30-minute visit with his wife and their two-year-old daughter. An officer stood by throughout their visit and explicitly warned Barrera and his wife not to discuss anything related to his arrest or detention, threatening to cut short their meeting if they did.

In the time leading up to his trial, Barrera was denied access to a lawyer and held in a small cell with prisoners who had been sentenced for violent crimes. The police informed Barrera of his trial only three hours before it was to take place. He was allowed to call his wife, who barely made it to court in time for his hearing. Before the trial began, Barrera asked if he could appoint his own lawyer, but authorities responded that they could not delay the trial and the state-appointed lawyers would serve the same function.

The trial, in which the state prosecutor accused Barrera of “dangerousness,” lasted less than an hour. His wife described the process as follows:

The trial was crazy. First of all, they didn’t let him speak. The prosecutor spoke of things that I had never heard of—that [my husband] would associate with dangerous people, delinquents; that they were going to punish him in order to prevent him from doing something against other people’s property; that he did not work; that he did not study; that he was not a part of the revolutionary process. And he is not like that.[5]

The state offered no proof and presented no witnesses to support its accusations, and Barrera’s state-assigned lawyer made no counter-arguments to refute the charges. The judge denied Barrera the right to speak in his own defense, despite his expressed wish to do so. Barrera was sentenced to four years in prison.

Over the subsequent two-and-a-half years, Barrera was moved to three different prisons, all of which were located a considerable distance from his home, making it difficult for his wife to visit him. In each prison, he was subjected to solitary confinement and other punishments for refusing to wear a prisoner’s uniform or partake in mandatory “re-education.”

To mark Human Rights Day on December 10, 2008, Barrera began to read aloud to his cellmates from a book his wife had brought him called Your Rights (Tus Derechos), which includes the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. According to his wife, whom Barrera later told about the incident:

An official arrived, roughed him up, and told him that he had to eat the book. [Barrera] said that he wasn’t going to eat the book, that he wasn’t some animal that eats books, and that there was nothing wrong with the book.[6]

Authorities confiscated the book and threw Barrera in solitary confinement.

Following days of solitary confinement, Barrera later told his wife, he was taken to a municipal court where he was tried for contempt for authority (desacato). He was denied the right to choose his own lawyer, the proceedings were closed to the public and conducted in summary fashion, and no evidence was presented against him except the accusations of the prison officials. His wife was not even informed that the trial was taking place. Barrera told his wife he had been sentenced to six additional years, bringing his combined sentence to ten years. He never received a copy of his sentence, nor any record that the hearing had taken place.

After Barrera was sentenced, his wife gave an interview to the foreign press denouncing his mistreatment and closed-door trial. In the aftermath, she said, prison officials cut off her visitation rights and phone calls with her husband.

Juan Luís Rodríguez Desdín [7]

Juan Luís Rodríguez Desdín, a 35-year-old dissident from Banes, Holguín, received several official warnings for “dangerousness” in 2006. The warnings accused him of “antisocial behavior,” he said, and advised him to abandon his “counterrevolutionary” activities. Rodríguez said his “antisocial behavior” was rooted in his participation in a pair of unofficial civil society groups, which documented human rights abuses and promoted political change. He attended gatherings and spoke openly about democratic change in Cuba.

On July 6, 2006, four policemen came to Rodríguez’s house and arrested him. He was taken to a police station, where he was held incommunicado for four days. He had no access to a lawyer and was not allowed to receive any family visits. Rodríguez was brought before a judge in a provincial court on July 10 and charged with “dangerousness.” He said the prosecutor accused him of being “disaffected with the government,” “opposed to the revolutionary system,” and therefore “not suited to live in society.” He was sentenced to four years in prison. He did not bother to appeal, he said, because “when they sentence you for this crime, it’s not worth appealing.” He was sent to Cuba Sí! prison.

Rodríguez’s problems with prison authorities began as soon as he arrived. He did not want to participate in mandatory “re-education” classes, which he said were dedicated to political indoctrination. As a result, he was placed in solitary confinement for 17 days. The cell had an open toilet in the middle of the floor, a cement platform for a bed, and, for a blanket, the leaves of a plantain tree.

When not in solitary confinement, Rodríguez was held in overcrowded cells of 80 to 100 prisoners convicted of violent crimes. He said that he and the other political prisoners were moved to different cells every few months—a strategy that he said left them more vulnerable to attacks by common prisoners, who were hostile to newcomers. He was also repeatedly punished for using his telephone calls to report abuses to human rights defenders outside of the prison. He said he was denied meals, medical attention, and access to the outdoors, and that there was no one to report the abuses to inside the prison.

Rodríguez was released on parole in July 2008, and resumed his participation in monitoring human rights and attending unsanctioned meetings. He lived under constant surveillance, he said, and was detained several times, during which authorities threatened to re-arrest him if he did not abandon his “antisocial behavior.”

His family also suffered constant harassment. An official visited Rodríguez’s wife, telling her that she would save herself trouble by divorcing her husband. His mother was issued citations and threatened by officials, and police conducted an investigation into his father’s activities as well.

Human Rights Watch last  spoke to Rodríguez in April 2009. According to human rights defenders in Cuba, the following month he was arrested again, and sentenced to two years for “public disorder” in a closed, summary trial.[8]