Ex-Cuban prison official, now in Miami, says allegations of abuse are lies

Posted on Friday, 11.02.12

Ex-Cuban prison official, now in Miami, says allegations of abuse are lies

A former top prison official in Cuba, now living in Miami, said he
treated everyone fairly and allegations of prison abuse are lies.
By Juan Carlos Chavez And Juan Tamayo
jcchavez@ElNuevoHerald.com

After two years of living anonymously in Miami, the former chief of the
Department of Prisons in Villa Clara, Cuba, broke his silence Thursday
and acknowledged that he had been a high-ranking official of that
country's Ministry of the Interior.

"I was the director of [the ministry's] Judiciary Department until
February 1996, and my job was to supervise and monitor the judicial
performance of chiefs and officials of the penal system in the province
of Villa Clara," said former Col. Crescencio Marino Rivero in an email
to El Nuevo Herald.

In an interview he later gave to the Channel 41 television program
América Tevé, he admitted that he had not informed U.S. authorities of
his position with the Cuban government.

"The paperwork was done by someone who dealt with this type of
documentation in the city of Santa Clara. At that moment I had been out
of [the ministry] for 14 years and working as an adjunct professor at
the university," Rivero said. "Here, nobody asked me. The documents that
I had to present to obtain residency were processed by an agency that
specialized in this type of paperwork."

Rivero denied that he abused and mistreated prisoners, and called three
former political prisoners and dissidents who made the accusations "liars."

"There are hundreds of honest and truthful people in this country who
served time in some of the prisons in Villa Clara. If they know me, they
would be aware of my ethical and moral behavior as chief of the
Department of Prisons. I helped hundreds of them to move on to better
prison conditions," Rivero told El Nuevo Herald.

Dissidents in Cuba such as Guillermo Fariñas, who won the 2010 Sakharov
Award of the European Parliament, and former political prisoners Rafael
Pérez and Benito Ortega accused Rivero of denying medical treatment to a
prisoner of conscience, making death threats and ordering the beating,
among other humiliating acts, of a pregnant woman.

The Rivero case emerged recently when two immigration attorneys in
Miami, Santiago Alpízar and Wilfredo Allen, contacted the U.S.
Department of Justice to find out how Rivero and his wife, Juana Ferrer,
a former immigration official in Cuba, could have entered the United
States in light of their backgrounds and the allegations of their accusers.

Rivero and Ferrer are legal U.S. residents and apparently receive
benefits paid by taxpayer money, the attorneys said.

Rivero accused Allen and Alpízar of seeking media exposure to gain
"fame" among Cuban immigrants in the United States for the purpose of
gaining new clients.

Rivero's wife was a lieutenant colonel at the Ministry of Interior.
Several dissidents say that she, with her husband, made threats and
worked against the peaceful opposition movement in Cuba.

Earlier this week, Rivero refused to respond to an El Nuevo Herald
reporter who knocked on the door of his modest apartment in southwest
Miami. A woman who identified herself as Rivero's daughter opened the
door and briefly said that her father would not make public statements
or have any contact with the news media.

Dissidents remember Rivero as an unpleasant man. Sources told El Nuevo
Herald that Rivero worked for Cuban State Security in the 1960s and
1970s. He was later promoted to director of reeducation in juvenile
prisons in the province of Villa Clara. By 1994, Rivero was in charge of
all prisons in the province, according to dissidents.

Rivero wrote in his email that his job was to uphold the law. "Not
applying personal criteria but only what the documents governing the
system [required], not establishing privileges or hardening the applied
sanctions to any detainee," he said.

He said he was a lawyer and an adjunct professor at the Central
University of Las Villas' Law School.

"I will not make any more statements; the chapter is closed," Rivero
added at the end of the email. "I will also state what is pertinent to
the federal district attorney or the courts if they were to ask me
regarding the legal manner in which I entered this country and live in it."

In Miami, Wilfredo Allen, the immigration attorney, rejected Rivero's
arguments and said his motive was not to boost his law practice.

"I have never received one single penny from anyone for representing and
helping people abused and persecuted in Cuba," Allen said.

Fariñas said that Rivero must accept his past of repression and face the
consequences of his acts.

"Rivero demonstrates in that email that he is an excellent disciple of
Fidel Castro," Fariñas, the Cuban dissident, told El Nuevo Herald from
his home in Santa Clara. "He is a great demagogue and liar."

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/02/3078966/ex-cuban-prison-official-now-in.html