The next day I was transferred to prison. And my life as a prisoner starts. That is when my passage through hell starts, as I recall the more than 200 prisons that exist in Cuba, where over 100,000 Cuban inmates reside. 100,000 Cuban citizens deprived from freedom. Not all of them are delinquents. They are people who have committed offenses that do not constitute an offense in other parts of the world. They are not offenses. But they are in Cuba.
They even are people who have done nothing. But in Cuba there is an offense, which is called criminal dissidence. Many of the people are against the system and they are put in prison under this type of offense, which is not really an offense since no trial is undertaken. I was one of those people. A week after being in prison we are informed that we will be in isolation for two years. Committed to isolation without having committed an offense. They wanted not only to let us know that we would be punished for almost a quarter of a century of our lives; they wanted to be much more cruel than that. They wanted to isolate us from the rest of society, from social interaction. And we were subject to the cruelest punishment that a human being can experience, which is solitary confinement for two years. To do this they transferred us to prisons far away from our place of residency.
I was in a 3 square meter cell with poor ventilation and with water service for only 5 minutes once a day. I was held in this type of cell for 23 hours per day and I was allowed to go out for one hour to other cells without a roof so that I could see the sunlight. The rest of the time I was sent again to my cell and I was kept under isolation. Nobody could talk to me. I could not communicate with anybody; I simply was there.
I somehow was able to break the isolation because like in all of Cuba, prisons are also full of corruption. Guards can be corrupted. Inmates also get creative and when we were able to break that isolation, and what did they do when we found a way out? They sent us to another prison also under isolation. This had a really devastating effect on me. I contracted a disease after one and a half years of being there. An illness I will carry for the rest of my life. An illness contracted due to this type of confinement, due to subjecting a person to such pressure and stress, to this confined state, where all interaction with the real world is lost. This caused me who at that time weighed 86 kilograms to weigh just 45 kilograms a year after.
I even came to think if my family would be all right, as I thought I could die any minute. From this point, pressure from the international community, friends, and family protested so much that the authorities felt obliged to take me to a hospital in prison and they started trying to do whatever they could.
I was taken to the national prison, east of Havana. I was admitted to the hospital there. They tried to stabilize me and get me to healthier. Two years had gone by, and I was taken out from isolation and allowed to mix with the rest of the inmates. I was in an individual cell but I was allowed to have contact. I was still being watched. My correspondence was still censored. Visits were allowed but only every six months. Here another chapter of my life started. I had the duty to preserve my life. I had that obligation. I had a sense of duty because of my religious faith, my family, my friends, and most of all due to a series of things including international pressure. My international group of friends was putting pressure on the Cuban regime because of my condition. They were putting pressure on my behalf. So I had a cause, a reason. So it was not my intention to die in prison. And thank God, because of my faith, and due to all those reasons I overcame this phase.
José Luis García Paneque was born in 1965 in Cuba. He studied medicine at the Institute of Medical Sciences of Camaguey. As a doctor, he specialized in plastic surgery.
In 1998, he became active as a dissident, joining the Freedom Press Agency, an alternative journalism project. In 2000, he became the initiative’s director. For his activism, he was removed from his position at the hospital where he worked.
In March 2003, Dr. García was among the 75 dissidents who were arrested in the crackdown known as the Black Spring. He was summarily sentenced to 24 years in prison. He was imprisoned for seven years and four months, two years of which were in solitary confinement. The harsh conditions in prison caused him to lose half of his body weight, posing life-threatening consequences to his health. In 2010, he was released in negotiations brokered by the Roman Catholic Church. As a condition of his release, Dr. García was required to leave Cuba.
Since leaving his homeland, Dr. García has overseen the Freedom Observatory project, which is associated with the Institute of Strategic and International Studies at the Catholic University of Valencia in Spain. He currently lives in Florida.
Follow Dr. García’s blog at http://vocesdeldestierro.wordpress.com/.
Cuba, an island nation of 11.4 million people in the northern Caribbean Sea, is a totalitarian state.
Fidel Castro led the 1959 Cuban Revolution and ruled the country for 49 years before formally relinquishing power to his younger brother Raul in 2008. Raul Castro is the current head of state and First Secretary of the Communist Party, which is recognized by the Cuban Constitution as the only legal political party and “the superior leading force of society and of the state.” Raul Castro has said that he will step down from power at the age of 86 in 2018.
Cuba was a territory of Spain until the Spanish-American War. The United States assumed control of the island until 1902, when the Republic of Cuba became formally independent. A fledgling democracy was established, with the U.S. continuing to play a strong role in Cuban affairs.
In 1952, facing an impending electoral loss, former president Fulgencio Batista staged a successful military coup and overthrew the existing government. While his first term as elected president in the 1940s largely honored progressive politics, universal freedoms, and the Cuban Constitution of 1940, Batista’s return to power in the 1950s was a dictatorship marked by corruption, organized crime and gambling. He held power until 1959 when he was ousted by Fidel Castro’s rebel July 26th Movement.
While promising free elections and democracy, Castro moved quickly to consolidate power. By 1961, Castro had declared Cuba to be a communist nation.
Castro’s communist government nationalized private businesses, lashed out at political opponents, and banned independent civil society. As Cuba aligned itself with the Soviet Union, Cuban-American relations soured, including a U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba. In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States and the Soviet Union came close to war, after the Soviets installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, prompting a U.S. naval embargo.
Since the revolution, Cuba has remained a one-party state. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the evaporation of Soviet economic support, Cuba loosened some economic policies, became more open to foreign investment, and legalized use of the U.S. dollar. By the late 1990s, Venezuela had become Cuba’s chief patron, thanks to the close relationship between the Castro brothers and Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez.
The regime continues to exercise authoritarian political control, clamping down on political dissent and mounting defamation campaigns against dissidents, portraying them as malignant U.S. agents. In a massive crackdown in 2003 known as the Black Spring, the government imprisoned 75 of Cuba’s best-known nonviolent dissidents.
The Cuban government does not respect the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, association, movement, and religion. The government and the Communist Party control all news media, and the government routinely harasses and detains its critics, particularly those who advocate democracy and respect of human rights. Frequent government actions against dissidents often take the form of attacks by regime-organized mobs. Prison conditions are harsh and often life-threatening, and the courts operate as instruments of the Communist Party rather than conducting fair trials.
Cuba relaxed its travel laws in 2013, allowing some prominent dissidents to leave and return to the country. It continues to experiment with modest economic reforms but remains committed to communist economic orthodoxy.
In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, Cuba was designated as “not free” and is grouped near the bottom of the world’s nations, with severely restricted civil rights and political liberties.
See all Cuba videos