Prison conditions in Cuba: What we know, what we don't know and why

A polemical question?

Alan P. Gross: Before and after five years in a Cuban prison

Alan Gross was never debriefed by the U.S. government following five years in captivity in Cuba. The Obama Administration never placed him as a priority in the normalization campaign, and this was a contributing factor to his long and unjust incarceration. During these five years in a Cuban prison he lost 5 teeth, 110 pounds and contemplated suicide before his December 17, 2014 release.

According to Alan Gross in a 2015 Sixty Minutes interview, Cuban officials had "threatened to hang me. They threatened to pull out my fingernails. They said I'd never see the light of day."

Officially, Gross was jailed for trying to provide uncensored internet access to a local Cuban Jewish community. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on November 13, 2012 confirmed that Alan Gross has been arbitrarily detained and should be immediately released.

In reality, Gross was a hostage used by the Castro dictatorship as a bargaining chip to obtain the release of Cuban spies arrested for espionage that involved planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, gathering information on military bases and conspired to carry out an act of state terrorism that led to the deaths of four civilians.

I was treated better as a political prisoner in Cuba. https://t.co/iij39KQQUd

— Alan P. Gross (@AlanPGross) June 23, 2019

Gross commenting on the terrible conditions for migrants, including children, at the Clint border station in Texas has repeatedly made the claim that he was treated better as a political prisoner in Cuba.  

Mr. Gross was a special case, of high value for the Cuban government that led to the release of key members of their WASP spy network. Therefore his experience may not have been typical.

It is possible to learn what prison conditions are like in U.S. prisons, but it is not so easy to do so in Cuba. The last time the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch were granted permission to enter a Cuban prison was in 1988. The International Committee of the Red Cross prior to that had not had access since 1959.

British businessman spent 16 months in Cuban prisons

Other foreigners, such as British businessman Stephen Purvis, have written their own accounts of prison life in Cuba, but there are also reports from respected human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch that paint a grim picture. 

In their World Report 2019 Human Rights Watch provides the following summary on prison conditions in Cuba:

Prison Conditions

Prisons are overcrowded. Prisoners are forced to work 12-hour days and are punished if they do not meet production quotas, according to former political prisoners. Inmates have no effective complaint mechanism to seek redress for abuses. Those who criticize the government or engage in hunger strikes and other forms of protest often endure extended solitary confinement, beatings, and restrictions on family visits, and are denied medical care.

While the government allowed select members of the foreign press to conduct controlled visits to a handful of prisons in 2013, it continues to deny international human rights groups and independent Cuban organizations access to its prisons.

On August 9, Alejandro Pupo Echemendía died in police custody at Placetas, Villa Clara, while under investigation for a crime related to horse racing. Family members say his body showed signs of severe beatings; authorities contend he threw himself against a wall and died of a heart attack. Allegations have surfaced of family members and witnesses being coerced to withdraw their initial statements and to confirm the official version.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in their 2017 annual report cited the Cuban NGO Cubalex that "reported that since the 2013 Universal  Periodical  Review  (UPR)  there have been 22 suicides of inmates by hanging in Cuba."

We know about the dismal conditions in the Texas border station and in the Guantanamo Naval Base prison because there is oversight. The reason that so much is known about the Guantanamo detention facility with regards to the prisoners there is because the International Committee of the Red Cross has visited it over 100 times. Meanwhile the Castro regime over the past 60 years permitted only one visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Cuba's prisons and that was 31 years ago in 1988.

The lack of international outrage sends a message and that is that not allowing human rights organizations to visit prisons for decades has a lower cost then opening them up to international inspection.

Why has the Castro regime systematically barred human rights experts from Cuba ?

International Committee of the Red Cross has been able to visit the U.S. Guantanamo Detention Center to report on detainees over 100 times while the Castro regime allowed one visit in 1988.

Protesting Guantanamo Detention Center but silence on Castro's prison complex

Human rights experts have been systematically barred from entering Cuba for years. The last time the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch were granted permission to enter a Cuban prison was in 1988. The International Committee of the Red Cross prior to that had not had access since 1959.

Maria Grazia Giammarinaro, the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons arrived in Cuba today, April 10th to examine the "challenges Cuba faces in addressing trafficking for sexual and labour exploitation, as well as any other forms of trafficking." Human trafficking is a big problem in Cuba, addressed in an earlier post, and one hopes that Ms. Grazia Giammarinaro is able to see beyond the Potemkin experience that Cuban officials will present to her. It will be interesting to learn how much access she will have to fulfill her mandate as a human rights expert.

Amnesty International in its 2016/2017 report stated the following:

"Independent human rights organizations and mechanisms, including UN Special Rapporteurs, did not have access to Cuba. Independent monitors were also denied access to prisons. Cuba remained the only country in the Americas region which Amnesty International did not have permission from authorities to visit."

The usual retort from the Castro regime and it's apologists is to cite the dismal human rights situation in the Guantanamo Naval Base. However the reason that so much is known and documented with regards to the prisoners there is because the International Committee of the Red Cross has visited the Guantanamo detention facility over 100 times.

Meanwhile the Castro regime over the past 58 years permitted only one visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross to Cuba's prisons and that was 29 years ago in 1988.


The lack of international outrage sends a message and that is that not allowing human rights organizations to visit prisons for decades has a lower cost then opening them up to international inspection.

You do the math. This doesn't add up to anything good in the long run.

Why the Obama policy will worsen human rights in Cuba and the Americas: A rebuttal

Between 1959 and the present the only two times that the International Committee of the Red Cross was able to  inspect Cuban prisons and their conditions were in 1988 and 1989 following the tightening of sanctions and isolation policies of the Reagan administration.

Machete attacks, breaking bones, knife attacks since 2012

Jose Miguel Vivanco's essay in Time Magazine titled "Lifting the Embargo Means Cuba Can No Longer Play Victim" gets a lot of things wrong, but let me begin with what the Americas director at Human Rights Watch gets more or less right when he states that:

"For decades, U.S. authorities stubbornly held that the embargo was necessary to promote human rights and democratic change in the island."

More accurately, U.S. politicians have used the above rhetoric in an attempt to appear like they were doing more than they were actually doing. This is not a practice limited to U.S.-Cuba policy.  The reality is that the aim of economic sanctions on Cuba as laid out as State Department policy in the early 1960s was a policy of containment and it worked while the United States was serious about pursuing it:  contributed to the economic implosion of the Soviet Union by raising the cost of subsidizing the Castro regime; demonstrated to other countries that expropriating U.S. businesses and properties had a cost; and saved U.S taxpayers billions of dollars that their Canadian, European and Latin American counterparts had to pay out when the regime proved to be a terrible credit risk time and time again. It is surprising that Mr. Vivanco overlooks these beneficial consequences of  the U.S. policy the Obama administration wants to scrap.

Mr. Vivanco also overlooks that the Obama administration, not only began to loosen sanctions on the Castro regime in April of 2009, but also refused to meet in June of 2009 with the winners of the NED Democracy Award who happened to be five Cuban dissidents that year. It was the first time in five years that the president of the United States had not met with the award laureates. In December of 2009 the Castro regime took Alan Gross hostage and the Obama administration responded with initial silence and it took American diplomats 25 days to visit with the arbitrarily detained American.

 Mr. Vivanco recognized that "Arbitrary arrests and short-term detention have increased dramatically" but failed to mention  that human rights have deteriorated in Cuba with rising levels of violence against nonviolent activists. including machete attacks, and the suspicious deaths of human rights defenders such as Orlando Zapata Tamayo (2010), Juan Wilfredo Soto Garcia (2011), Laura Inés Pollán Toledo (2011), Wilman Villar Mendoza (2012), Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas (2012), and Harold Cepero Escalante (2012).

Unfortunately, its not only Human Rights Watch that has not addressed what appear to be extrajudicial killings and physical assaults with machetes that have disfigured activists in the past couple of years goes unmentioned. Human Rights Foundation commissioned a study that found that from 2000 to 2014, Amnesty International’s Americas chapter "spent 56.5 percent of its output decrying U.S. injustices, but only 4.3 percent on a stone-cold dictatorship like Cuba that, up until last year, still had 114 political prisoners." 

The Obama administration responded to the taking of Alan Gross (2009) and the death of prisoner of conscience Orlando Zapata Tamayo (2010) by further loosening sanctions on the Castro regime in January of 2011.  The number of high profile activists who died under suspicious circumstances after the second round of loosening of sanctions should give one pause in Mr. Vivanco's optimism with the administration's new policy.

On February 3, 2015 Rosa María Payá Acevedo's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee issues a damning indictment:

On 22 July 2012, Cuban State Security detained the car in which my father, Oswaldo Payá, and my friend Harold Cepero, along with two young European politicians, were traveling. All of them survived, but my father disappeared for hours only to reappear dead, in the hospital in which Harold would die without medical attention.

The Cuban government wouldn’t have dared to carry out its death threats against my father if the US government and the democratic world had been showing solidarity. If you turn your face, impunity rages. While you slept, the regime was conceiving their cleansing of the pro-democracy leaders to come. While you sleep, a second generation of dictators is planning with impunity their next crimes.

Mr. Vivanco claims that when it comes to the unilateral approach "[e]mpirical evidence shows that it was irrational to continue insisting on a policy that never achieved its proposed objectives," but history demonstrates otherwise. For the first time since 1959 the International Committee of the Red Cross was able to inspect Cuban prisons in 1988 and 1989. The last time that Amnesty International was allowed into Cuba by the Castro regime was in 1990 and in the case of Human Rights Watch 1995.  This was after the Reagan Administration undid the policies of the Carter administration and tightened sanctions on Cuba, engaged in aggressive diplomacy internationally, in 1982 placed Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, and broke the information monopoly inside Cuba with Radio Marti.  Human rights groups were welcomed back in the midst of a very different policy then the current one advocated by the White House. Human rights organizations were not invited to Cuba during the 2000 loosening of sanctions and diplomatic outreach by the Clinton administration. It will be interesting to see if this time the pattern changes or continues to be repeated umder the Obama administration.  


Setting the historical record straight

Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime on January 1, 1959 following a U.S. arms blockade being imposed on the military dictator. On January 7, 1959 the United States recognized the new Cuban government ushered in by the Castro brothers and had actively pressured Batista to leave imposing an arms embargo in 1958. The United States thought that it could have normal relations with the Cuban revolutionary government which was also a reason for recognition within the span of a week. In comparison it had taken the United States 17 days to recognize the government of Fulgencio Batista following his March 10, 1952 coup. The United States had not been consulted ahead of time about Batista's coup and this led to the delay in recognition. 

On March 3, 1959 the Castro regime expropriates properties belonging to the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, and took over its affiliate, the Cuban Telephone Company. On May 17, 1959 the government expropriated farm lands over 1,000 acres and banned land ownership by foreigners. On February 6, 1960 talks begin publicly between the U.S.S.R and Fidel Castro. The Soviet Union agreed to buy five million tons of sugar over five years. They also agreed to support Cuba with oil, grain, and credit. On July 6, 1960 the Castro regime passed a nationalization law authorizing nationalization of U.S.-owned property through expropriation. Texaco, Esso, and Shell oil refineries were taken. These policies combined with the Castro regime engaging the Soviet Union led the Eisenhower administration towards an embargo on Cuba and in 1960 exploring options to overthrow the new dictatorship that ended in the Kennedy Administration first with the Bay of Pigs fiasco and later Operation Mongoose overseen by his brother and attorney general, Robert Kennedy.

The Castro regime beginning in 1959 sent armed expeditions to Panama, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic to overthrow their governments. This destabilizing policy led a two thirds majority of the 21 states of Latin America voted to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States on February 14, 1963.   A cache of three tons of weapons was found on a Venezelan beach in November 1963 that was to be used to disrupt the democratic elections there.

Throughout the 1960s the policy of isolation and sanctions were also supported by much of Latin America because the efforts of the Castro regime to violently overthrow their governments led to hemispheric unity for a policy of isolation and sanctions.

Dictators Reynaldo Bignone and Fidel Castro

It can be argued that the efforts of the United States beginning in the Ford administration to normalize relations with the Castro regime, that were then accelerated and intensified during the Carter administration, contributed to weakening this hemispheric consensus and ironically opened the way for the Castro regime not only to overthrow a right wing dictator in Nicaragua installing a Marxist-Leninist regime there but also to a strange alliance with the right wing dictatorship in Argentina that at the time was "disappearing" 30,000 leftists.

This policy of détente was rejected by the Reagan administration in 1981 but would reassert itself first during the Clinton Administration beginning in 1994 when President Bill Clinton authorized permanent contacts and joint exercises with the Castro regime's military culminating when he shook hands with Fidel Castro in 2000 and opened cash and carry trade with the dictatorship loosening sanctions.  This was done in spite of tightening sanction in 1996 following the Brothers to the Rescue shoot down. This new period of engagement coincided with the rise of Hugo Chavez and reversals of the democratic gains made in the 1980s and early 1990s. During the George W. Bush Administration the cash and carry trade continued as did the joint military exercises. Even though in 2003 in the aftermath of the Black Cuban spring in which 75 dissidents were jailed following show trials the Bush administration responded by tightening sanctions limiting travel by Cuban exiles to Cuba and remittances. Despite this under the Bush Administration the United States became the fifth leading trade partner with the Castro regime in 2008.

Incidentally, it was in September of 2008 when Mr. Vivanco along with another Human Rights Watch colleague were both expelled from Venezuela.  Unlike the Castro regime, Hugo Chavez despite having normal trade relations with the United States was still playing the victim card as does Nicolas Maduro now. Both strong men have relied on the Cuban intelligence service and a large Cuban presence to prop up their regimes.

Fidel Castro lounging with war criminal Mengistu Haile Mariam, in Ethiopia in 1977

One could argue that it is this policy of engagement and detente with the Castro regime over the years that served to empower other anti-democratic actors in the region with the aide of the Cuban intelligence service and military. These are the gains that are isolating the United States not economic sanctions. It is important to recall that the long term policy goals first enunciated by Fidel Castro on July 26, 1959 continue into the present: "We promise to continue making Cuba the example that can convert the cordillera of the Andes into the Sierra Maestra of the American continent." The Cuban dictatorship has also pursued an ambitious foreign policy in Africa, that in the case of Ethiopia contributed to famine and mass murder, while relations improved with the Carter administration in the 1970s.

If the Obama administration achieves its goal of lifting sanctions on the regime, and as was done by the Bush administration with North Korea, remove Cuba from the list of terror sponsors as part of a political agenda and not improved behavior then not only will the human rights situation in Cuba remain dismal but the human rights situation in the Americas will continue to deteriorate. With all due respect to Mr. Vivanco this promises to be a disaster.

ICRC on how communist dictatorship in Cuba ended their visits to Cuban prisons in 1959

International Committee of the Red Cross, July 12, 2005

The ICRC since 1945: Cuba, the revolution and its immediate aftermath

12-07-2005

How the ICRC entered into contact with Cuban revolutionary forces, supervised the transfer of wounded prisoners, and carried out a series of visits to jails in post-revolutionary Cuba.

By the end of 1957, Fidel Castro's rebel movement had wrested control of parts of Cuba from the forces of the Batista government. Concerned by the humanitarian consequences of the conflict, the ICRC sent a message to the Cuban Red Cross in April 1958, asking what could be done to help the victims.

No direct reply was forthcoming but in a telegram received at the beginning of July, Fidel Castro asked for ICRC help in organizing the release and transfer of wounded government prisoners who his medics were unable to care for because they lacked medical supplies. He said the wounded soldiers needed urgent help.

There followed a further exchange of messages, routed through the Venezuelan capital, Caracas and using the Swiss short-wave radio service. The ICRC shared these messages with the Cuban Red Cross and on 9 July sent a delegate, Pierre Jequier, to the island. Jequier's mission was to offer practical assistance to the Red Cross, to promote respect for common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (dealing with internal conflicts), and to assess the need for humanitarian relief on the rebel side, as well as ways to ensure its distribution.

 Rebel radio transmitter  

After a meeting with the head of state, President Batista, Jequier obtained authorization to arrange for the transfer of wounded. The authorities proposed that it take place near the southern town of Bayamo, close to rebel-held areas. The proposal was relayed to Castro's forces through ICRC headquarters and a radio station in Caracas, tuned to the rebels' transmitter in the Sierra Maestra. The rebels rejected the location, saying it would require a long walk through the mountains, and made a new proposal.

It took several days for the parties to agree on a location, but at last a truce was declared on 23 and 24 July. Jequier and a new colleague from Geneva went to the place suggested by Castro, an advance post of the Cuban army. " There they watched as a woman bearing a white flag approached on horseback. She told them that 50 wounded prisoners were nearby. She was then joined by Che Guevara, who told the delegates that 200 more prisoners were a bit further away… " . *

All of the prisoners were handed over to the Cuban army, watched by the ICRC and the Cuban Red Cross, whose doctors gave first aid to those needing it. To round off their involvement, and before leaving Cuba for Geneva, the delegates provided money to the Cuban Red Cross to buy medical supplies for the rebel army.

A fortnight later a representative of the Cuban revolutionary movement ( Frente Civico Revolucionaro ) visited Geneva and urged the ICRC to carry out visits to rebels held by the government, as well as army personnel held by the Castro forces. A delegate went to Havana in September and made contact with the authorities, but was unable to secure agreement for visits or other activities. He returned to Geneva but the ICRC kept trying to persuade Cuban representatives to allow further action, but to no avail.

 ICRC appeal  

On 30 December 1958, on the eve of the collapse of the Batista regime, the ICRC appealed to both sides to respect the spirit of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and to apply the provisions of Article 3. Two days later the new leadership of the Cuban Red Cross contacted the ICRC, which decided to send Pierre Jequier back to Havana.

Jequier met the new head of state, Dr. Urrutia, who undertook to respect the provisions of the Geneva Conventions for " military prisoners " . The next day the delegate visited an internment camp where some 400 prisoners, military and civilian, were being held.

Despite this promising start, Cuba's new foreign minister told Jequier of his disappointment over the fact that the ICRC had failed to take action to protect civilians who had fallen into the hands of the police before the collapse of the former government. Jequier explained the restrictions facing the ICRC in situations of internal conflict, namely that the authorities had to agree to it taking any action - which had not been the case under the deposed regime. There followed a suspension of visits, but they resumed on 9 March at the country's main prison, La Cabaña, where a thousand prisoners were held.

 Improvements at the jail  

Subsequently Jequier, joined by another delegate from Geneva, established a comprehensive plan for visiting jails in the country, without advance notice. When they went to La Cabaña for the second time they were able to report that conditions had improved since their first visit. By July 1959, they had visited all prisons and returned to Geneva.

Early the following year, in a climate of worsen ing relations between Cuba and the United States, the ICRC received requests from Cuban migrants in the US who claimed that prison conditions were worsening and urged the ICRC to intervene. Despite repeated attempts, the ICRC was unable to obtain permission to carry out any more visits.

The situation became acute after the Bay of Pigs operation, in which Cuban exiles, backed by the United States, attempted a sea-borne invasion. They were defeated and the vast majority of the invading force was captured. The ICRC renewed its call to the authorities for access to prisons, but again without success.

In March 1962, when the captured fighters were about to go on trial, the president of the ICRC appealed to Fidel Castro, asking that the provisions of Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions be fully applied. The message once again asked for permission to visit prisoners. Further approaches were made, but Cuba's prison doors remained firmly closed to the ICRC.

 Read more on this in Françoise Perret's   article   in the International Review of the Red Cross  

https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/resources/documents/misc/6e8d35.htm