If you are anywhere near NYC tomorrow, get yourself to 315 Lexington Ave., and stand up for a free Cuba, end the half-century of horrors inflicted on the Cuba people imprisoned on the island. Take a stand, let the world know what is going on in Cuba; let them know what happens to our island brothers and sisters who protest against the regime.
Here's a reminder from Juan Carlos González Leiva, reporting from prison, and published by Cubanet:
The Cuban Foundation for Human Rights reports the agonizing conditions of terror and torture suffered by women detained at this penitentiary, a unit of Cuban State Security in the province of Holguin, Cuba.
Day and night, the screams of tormented women in panic and desperation who cry for God's mercy fall upon the deaf ears of prison authorities. They are confined to narrow cells with no sunlight called "drawers" that have cement beds, a hole on the ground for their bodily needs, and are infested with a multitude of rodents, roaches, and other insects.
These female prisoners lack all sort of necessary personal possessions and almost always have no water, even for bathing, often drinking this precious liquid full of insects. The food distributed to them is terrible, smells rotten, and is stored in receptacles lacking in hygiene. Even prison officials have complained of the small quantities served.
In these "drawers" the women remain weeks and months. When they scream in terror due to the darkness (blackouts are common) and the heat, they are injected sedatives that keep them half-drugged.
They are supervised by men who personally administer the feminine products they need and who so often open these "drawers" without respecting their privacy.
One female prisoner cried out, "get me out!", "get me out, I'm suffocating!", and an official called Marino replied: "stick your nose out through a hole and shut up!"
If anyone in the penitentiary protests out loud, they are taken to assigned punishment cells where they must abide by a ruthless discipline.
And these haunting words of recollection from Armando Valledares, who spent 22 years in Castro's gulag:
I had many friends in prison. One of them, Roberto López Chávez, was just a kid. He went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses. The guards denied him water, Roberto lay on the floor of his punishment cell, agonizing, deliriously asking for water. water? The soldiers came in and asked him: "Do you want water?"? The they took out their members and urinated in his mouth, on his face? He died the following day. We were cellmates; when he died I felt something wither inside me.
I recall when they kept me in a punishment cell, naked, with several fractures on one leg which never received medical care; today, those bones remain jammed up together and displaced. One of the regular drills among the guards was to stand on the steel mesh ceiling and throw at my face buckets full of urine and excrement.
Mr. Chairman, I know the taste of the urine and the excrement of other men? that practice does not leave marks; marks are left by beatings with steel rods and by bayonet thrusts. My head is still covered with scars and you can feel the cracks.
But, what can inflict more damage to human dignity, the urine and excrements thrown all over your face or a bayonet's blow? Which is the appropriate article for the discussion of this subject? Under which technical point does it fall? Under what batch of papers, numbers, lines and bars should we include this trampling of human dignity?
For me, and for innumerable other human beings around the world. The violation of human rights was not a matter of reports, of negotiated resolutions, of elegant and diplomatic rhetoric, for us was a daily suffering.
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