The prison system of the Castro Ruz brothers’ regime is very different from what Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque reported before the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Víctor Rolando Arroyo Carmona is a political prisoner who is serving an unjust sentence of 26 years of incarceration in Guantánamo’s Combinado Prison. He was recently placed in solitary confinement and threatened with prosecution under charges of “Contempt” after expressing to his assigned Reeducation Officer First Lieutenant Juan Armesto of the Ministry of the Interior that the orthopedic doctor treating him was a “horse,” given the care he was receiving. Arroyo Carmona finds himself in poor health and it is unknown how long he will remain in punishment.

    This information was transmitted via telephone by a fellow political prisoner, Félix Navarro Rodríguez, who refuses any contact with First Lieutenant Armesto. He handles four prisoners of conscience, including Arroyo Carmona and Navarro Rodríguez, better known to prison officials as CRs or “counter revolutionaries.”

    Navarro Rodríguez adds that he was personally visited by a high ranking military officer from Havana to assure him that a letter he sent to the Council of State on March 7 detailing abuses against prisoners was a “bum’s rantings,” not a description of torture. Navarro Rodríguez expressed his surprise at how practices like interrogating a 5 year old girl, or interrogating detainees for several hours in a room with a very low temperature (causing the miscarriage of two women who were subjected to this treatment), or keeping two elderly men, one 76 years old and the other nearing his 80s, in degrading conditions, did not fit his definition of torture.

    This is why Navarro clearly defined the prison situation in Cuba in the aforementioned letter when he asserted that, “In each Cuban prison Fidel Castro can find the same conditions that he so criticizes in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib”.