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Freedom Collection

Interviews with Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antúnez

Interviewed December 21, 2024

There were so many [incidents of torture]! In 1995, after eight days on a hunger strike, and for only trying to greet a political prisoner as I was being taken to the infirmary, I was brutally beaten by high-ranking officials in the Kilo 8 Prison in Camaguey.

Right now I suffer from a tear or a lesion in my right knee for which I will soon get an operation, God willing.
On October 10, 1994, the year I turned 30, high-ranking Political Police officials at Santa Clara Del Presidio Prison beat me with machetes. I can show you the scars. They struck me with the back of a machete, the dull side of the blade, but “accidentally,” the machete shifted and they cut me.

And I tell you, there are so many examples that it is difficult… In the Guantanamo Prison, in Cuba, they put me in the “tolas” cells, hermetically enclosed cells with steel plated doors. I almost suffocated to death. I spent 45 days and nights next to Nestor Rodriguez Lobaina, the former prisoner of conscience.

There are so many examples of the torture that, had I come prepared, I would have shared a host of tortures because… I am a specialist in the tortures I endured.

[Nestor Rodriguez Lobaina (1965 – ) is a Cuban freedom activist and former prisoner of conscience.]