Prison Diary XLII No Right to Have Rights

Prison Diary XLII: No Right to Have Rights / Angel Santiesteban
Posted on August 3, 2013

The prison population has been overcome by stomach upset from a chicken
not kept cold, completely decomposed, that was served to the prisoners.
That night, everyone except me — I have been in this place three months
without accepting "food" — ran from their beds to the bathroom. Lately
it has also happened with the hash and other dishes.

A prisoner who tried to demand his rights, was savagely beaten and then
sent to the punishment cell, which is their way of imposing order.

The lack of doctors in the prison, the tiny food ration and its poor
quality, the constant beatings of the prisoners by the guards, the
forced labor without pay, mental patients receiving psychotropic drugs
three times a day, unfair penalties, the mistreatment of family,
bedbugs, scabies, lice, lack of water in the prison and, thus, poor
sanitation and cleanliness of the prisoners, the poor condition of the
barracks, make this prison 1580, into an Olympian concentration camp.

The prisoners, who know through me and the politician Piloto Barceló,
that Cuba received numerous recommendations in Geneva where the alleged
"human rights" prevailing in the island, were exposed, are pinning their
hopes on the Commission to return again in September, that the
Rapporteurs who visit prisons will listen to them and their families
recount the outrages of their legal process and then the penalties for
offenses that are not considered such in any part of the world, and
especially, as we have made known, the obligation to sign the UN
Covenants, after evading them for over five years and that, at the last
meeting, they were denied the time they asked for, alleging they weren't
prepared.

That would be the beginning, if they signed, our dream as Cubans not to
be censored or persecuted for what we say, much less imprisoned.

To paraphrase Willy Chirino, "the dream is already coming."


Ángel Santiesteban-Prats, Prison 1580

1 August 2013

Source: "Prison Diary XLII: No Right to Have Rights / Angel Santiesteban
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