The human rights organization Prisoners Defenders published a study this week, based on interviews with Cuban political prisoners and other empirical data, finding that the communist regime tortures 100 percent of its political prisoners through a wide variety of tactics including beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation, rape and threats of rape, and physical attacks on their relatives.
Some political prisoners documented the use of dogs to brutalize them, and others the use of “chemical poisoning” to slowly destroy their health. Many detailed excruciating beatings that left long-term scars and permanent damage, such as hearing loss. All were imprisoned for political reasons, accused of “disrespect” to the communist revolution, or charged with seemingly apolitical crimes, such as “spreading disease,” during protests (an offshoot of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic).
Prisoners defenders noted that not one of the respondents in the study was “assisted or defended, at any time, by an independent attorney.” All attorneys in Cuba answer to the Communist Party, making due process impossible.
The report, titled Torture in Cuba, is unique in that it analyzes the prevalence of 15 methods of torture, as defined by the United Nations, at the same time. The study is based on questionnaires and conversations with 181 political prisoners and their families nationwide. The study tabulated the responses in 168 cases and found “100% [of respondents] have suffered torture and ill-treatment mechanisms.” The vast majority, the study notes, did not have a significant history of activism before their arrest. Four of the 168 were children when they began their time in prison.
Prisoners Defenders emphasized that documented cases of torture in Cuba are likely rare relative to the total number of incidents of state torture: “we estimate that only a very small percentage of the actual cases of torture, as well as other violations, are being denounced, being that only a minority of families denounce these facts.”
The communist Castro regime, in power for over half a century in Cuba, has maintained an atrocious human rights record littered with firing squad executions, psychological and physical torture, and widespread malnutrition and sickness. It has faced consistent acts of defiance despite its brutality and continues to experience routine street protests despite the prevalence of arrests for “crimes” such as “social dangerousness” and “disrespect.”
The NGO Cuban Observatory of Conflict documented nearly 4,000 protests throughout Cuba in 2022, an escalation from the past decade and a sign that the outrage triggering the historic July 11, 2021, protests across the country had far from subsided.
Many of the political prisoners and former prisoners consulted for the Prisoners Defenders study were arrested on July 11, 2021, forced into dangerous prisoners, or kept on house arrest with little evidence of having committed any crime. The study identified 15 forms of torture and mistreatment:
1. Deprivation of medical care among political prisoners.
2. Forced labor and work that is not related to their status as a criminal defendant or convicted person.
3. Highly uncomfortable, harmful, degrading and prolonged positions.
4. Prolonged solitary confinement.
5. Use of temperature as a torture mechanism.
6. Physical aggressions.
7. Abnormal driving to locations unknown to inmates and family members.
8. Intentional disorientation.
9. Deprivation of liquids and/or food.
10. Intentional sleep deprivation.
11. Deprivation of communication with family, defense and relatives.
12. Threats to them, their integrity, their safety and that of their loved ones.
13. Display or threatening exhibition of weapons or elements of torture.
14. Intentional subjection to anguish, grief or uncertainty about the situation of a family member.
15. Humiliation, degradation and verbal abuse.
All of the respondents said prison guards used sleep deprivation and starved them or denied them water while in police custody. The profiles of individual prisoners revealed in vivid detail other forms of torture, including extensive beatings. Both men and women, though more commonly women, denounced rape or threats of rape by prison guards.
“They gave her too many blows and months later she still had the marks, which is much worse,” a relative of Gabriela Zequeira Hernández, who was 17 when she was arrested on July 11, 2021, for being in the vicinity of a protest, wrote. “She does not hear very well in one ear because of the kind of blows they gave her there. They hit her on the head, pushed her, mistreated her psychologically, sexually and physically.”
Zequeira insists she was not participating in the protests. Following her release, she filmed an interview with the independent outlet Cubanet stating that police officials rejected her claims to being a minor and forced her to dress down and digitally rape herself before threatening to imprison her with two large men known for raping inmates.
Her interview prompted international outrage and the Castro regime ultimately sentenced her to eight months of house arrest rather than prison time.
Torture in Cuba also details abuses against a long-term prisoner, Leandro Cerezo Sirut, who was beaten so severely last year that he was left with a “14-stitch wound on his head.” Cerezo was arrested in 2007 and was sentenced to life in prison for reportedly mutinying while fulfilling his mandatory military service.
Cerezo’s case also stands out because Cuban authorities did not limit their abuse to him.
“The state security forces injured his 74-year-old grandmother, causing the amputation of a leg, and threatened his mother and younger brother with imprisonment,” respondents for Cerezo told Prisoners Defenders.
Respondents on behalf of another July 11 prisoner, Maikel Armando Peña Suárez, accused the regime of using attack dogs to maul him: “they threw dogs on him.” Suárez was 21 at the time of his arrest and sentenced to eight years in prison on the charges of “disrespect,” “public disorder,” and “sabotage.”
“The victim with the highest intensity of torture is José Daniel Ferrer García, 52 years old, who has been receiving constant sonic attacks since he entered Mar Verde prison in 2021, in addition to chemical poisoning in his water and food,” the report noted.
José Daniel Ferrer is the head of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), believed to be the country’s largest dissident organization. The Castro regime regularly imprisons Ferrer, letting him out occasionally in response to international pressure, and has subjected both him and his family to years of abuse. In 2019, during an extended prison stay, Ferrer’s family denounced that guards made him drink “semi-fecal” water and eat “spoiled food.” Ferrer most recently disappeared into police custody on July 11, 2021.