"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
Showing posts with label Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros. Show all posts
The United Nations
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984), defines "torture" as "any act by which severe pain or
suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a
person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person
information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third
person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or
intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based
on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted
by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a
public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does
not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or
incidental to lawful sanctions."
Cuba
With regard to reports of harassment, arbitrary arrests, intimidation,
imprisonment, and reprisals against human rights defenders, the
Committee urged Cuba to end these practices. The Committee also emphasized the importance of an independent and impartial judicial
system.
Concerning the crackdowns on the social protests in July 2021, the
Committee urged Cuba to promptly and thoroughly investigate arbitrary
detentions, excessive use of force and ill-treatment, and punish those
responsible. The Committee also called for Cuba to establish a national
human rights institution and an independent mechanism to conduct regular
unannounced visits to all places where people are deprived of their
liberty.
Civil society groups presented a report on torture practices of the Cuban government that is available online, and was presented to UNCAT. Below are some cases of torture in Cuba that stretch back 17 years. This is not an exhaustive list.
Prisoner of conscience forcibly injected with HIV in 2018
Sister and Brother: Omara Ruiz Urquiola and Ariel Ruiz Urquiola
In May 2018, Ariel Ruiz Urquiolawas
arbitrarily detained, sentenced and jailed from early May to early July
2018. He was subjected to cruel and unusual punishment during his
imprisonment when Cuban officials forcibly injected him with HIV. The International Society for Human rights has provided
evidence that substantiates the charge, and below is his testimony before the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2020.
Lady in White mistreated by prison doctors, left near death (2018 - 2020) .
Dr. Alfredo Melgar, a specialist in Internal Medicine and lead doctor treating Xiomara Cruz Miranda, in a May 2020 interview, believes that she was exposed while in the Cuban prison to"various
chemicals." Cuban doctors in the island, at varying times, told her she
was either suffering from Tuberculosis or lung cancer as her condition
continued to worsen. Dr. Melgar affirms that these substances had possibly caused irreversible lung damage.
Over the course of one year in custody of the Cuban government her health radically declined. Rashes appeared on her body in June 2019 that Cuban medical doctors in Ciego de Ávila claimed to be unable to diagnose.
She was able to finally obtain medical care in the United States in
January 2020 when she was near death, and spent seven months in
intensive care in Jackson Memorial Hospital, and was finally well enough to continue her treatment as an outpatient.
Cuban dissident subjected to a machete attack, denied adequate medical care as punishment. (2015)
Sirley Avila Leon: Before and after the 2015 machete attack.
Sirley Ávila León
was a delegate to the Municipal Assembly of People’s Power
in Cuba from June 2005, for the rural area of Limones until 2012 when
the regime gerrymandered her district out of existence. Cuban officials
removed her from her position because she had fought to reopen a
school in her district, but been ignored by official channels and had
reached out to international media. Her son, Yoerlis Peña Ávila, who had
an 18 year distinguished career in the Cuban military was forced out
when he refused to declare his mother insane and have her committed to a
psychiatric facility.
Sirley joined the ranks of the democratic
opposition and repression against her increased dramatically. On May 24,
2015 she was the victim of a brutal machete attack carried out by
Osmany Carriòn, with the complicit assistance of his wife, that led to
the loss of her left hand, right upper arm nearly severed, and knees
slashed into leaving her crippled.
This attack, she believes, was done on the orders of the secret police. Following it she did not
receive adequate medical care and was told quietly by medical doctors in
Cuba that if she wanted to get better that she would need to leave the
country.
Medical mistreatment of Cuban political prisoner left him permanently disabled (2005).
Omar Pernet Hernández August 15, 1945 - October 7, 2017
Cuban dissident and former prisoner of conscience Omar Pernet Hernández
passed away in Louisville, Kentucky on October 7, 2017. Beginning in
1965 at age 18 he was
imprisoned for the first time in Cuba for political reasons.
Years later in an interview
he would sum up his life in Cuba: "I was tortured in Castros' jails in
four processes since 1965, when I was going to turn 19 years old." During his final imprisonment he described how doctors engaged in
malpractice against him following a car accident while he was being
transferred from one prison to another that left him crippled.
Omar Pernet: Look, the meaning of this, is that this type of boot that
you see here....I will show it to you again. This boot was fitted for me
in Cuba and it began to damage my hips because one, the left, is longer
than the right. Then, one hip went like this 0:30
(shows the way hip is going up). Then, here in Spain, they said I
couldn't go on wearing those boots, and they asked me to cut them down,
and told me to make the ones I'm wearing. These I'm wearing now are
stabilizing my hips.
INT: "How is it possible, since the Cuban doctors are so excellent
normally, at least that's what the Cubans say, and promote throughout
the world. That they should be so wrong? And hurt you so much? How many
months did you stay that way in Cuba?"
OP: Well, in 2005, on the 5th of April, I began to wear these boots
until the 17-18. I stayed like that until the 3rd of March of 2008 using
those boots. These I'm wearing now are different, from Spain. "
Stands up, 2:06,
shows.
"The only thing they did was to slap a cast on. They had me on a cast
from the tips of my toes up to my neck for 18 months. The doctors here
[in Spain] say they don't find any logic to it. That it was intolerable,
the amount of time I spent in those conditions. The cast was removed
twice, and each time it was to break my leg again."
Omar Pernet Hernández was 72 years old when he passed away, a victim of cancer. He had spent 22 years in Castro's prisons
for defying the communist regime and lived in forced exile for the
final nine years of his life.
Yosvany Arostegui died on hunger strike on August 7, 2020
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in his 1861 book, The House of the Dead
that "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering
its prisons." What does this say about the Cuban government that has
barred the International Committee of the Red Cross from visiting Cuba's prisons for decades?
Cuban dissident Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died last year on August 7, 2020 in Cuba while in police custody following a 40 day hunger strike. He had been jailed on false charges in the Kilo 8 prison of Camagüey. His body was quickly cremated by the dictatorship.
Yale professor and author Carlos Eire writing in Babalu Blog highlighted Yosvany's untimely passing and placed it in context:
It’s happened again. Another Cuban dissident has died in prison. Strangely, unlike previous hunger-striking political prisoners who received international attention, Yosvany Arostegui was barely noticed in social media and totally ignored by the world’s news outlets. He joins a long list of hunger-strikers who have been pushed to their deaths by the Castro regime. May his self-immolation in prison be the last, and may he rest in peace and eternal freedom.
Exiled Cuban lawyer and human rights defender Laritza Diversent over Facebook wrote:
I feel deep sadness and pain. I imagine how lonely he felt and how convinced he was that he preferred to exhaust his body until it was turned off. His death reminds me of the thousands of people who, in Cuban prisons, use their body to protest against unjust criminal proceedings. It makes me more aware of all the activists who, like Silverio Portal, are locked up as punishment for exercising their rights to free expression, criticize, protest, meet and associate.
On Friday, August 7, 2020 State Security contacted the family of prisoner Yosvany Aróstegui Armenteros to inform them that he had died during a hunger strike that he had carried out for 40 days.
Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros
Aróstegui Armenteros had been arrested a year earlier and prosecuted for two common crimes for which he pleaded not guilty from the beginning. Before this last strike he had carried out others with the same objective: to demand his freedom.
As in the case of Orlando Zapata Tamayo (February 2010), Aróstegui Armenteros was transferred to Kilo 8 prison from another prison and then transferred to the Prison ward of the Amalia Simoni Hospital in the city of Camagüey. Authorities at the Kilo 8 Prison have a torture system to subject prisoners who go on strike: they isolate them, and take away their water, the only sustenance of any striker.
In the case of Zapata and thanks to pressure from opposition groups outside the Amalia Simoni hospital, his mother was able to see him and learn from his lips about the torture and denial of water to which he had been subjected.
Yosvany Aróstegui did not have the same luck. His brother, Yaudel Aróstegui Armenteros was not allowed to see him.
“Ten days before he died, they called my brother Yaudel Arostegui Armenteros, at the hospital to appear there, when he arrived at Amalia Simoni they told him that my brother was very ill. My brother couldn't see him. A doctor who was there told my brother that the next call they were going to make would not be good, it was because he was going to die. And so it was,” Raidel Aróstegui Armenteros, who lives in exile in the state of Washington, United States, told the Center for a Free Cuba.
According to Raidel, his brother always said he was innocent of the common crimes he was accused of. The family hired an attorney who conducted investigations into the case, but a week before the trial, the attorney mysteriously died in a traffic accident.
"We're taking a step forward on America's rocky but righteous journey towards justice." - Martin Luther King III, August 28, 2020
Fifty years ago on August 28, 1963 much of the United States was in the midst of a struggle to do away with segregation
and civil rights activists were struggling to pass voting rights
legislation. The march on Washington D.C. that culminated in Martin
Luther King Jr.'s I have a dream speech sought to pressure legislators into voting for the legislation, and they succeeded.
This was a nonviolent revolution that sought justice, and changed the United States of America and in 2009 an African American president sat in the White House evidence that part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream had been achieved.
Today at a moment of national crisis Martin
Luther King III, son of the martyred civil rights leader, together with his daughter returned to the Lincoln Memorial to address questions of racism and injustice in the United States in 2020 and share their message of love and the legacy of their dad and grandad respectively. This event began last night and will continue into this evening and is live streaming.
“We stand and march for love, and we will fulfill my grandfather's dream,” Yolanda Renee King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., says during the March on Washington. https://t.co/S58qRg2xjvpic.twitter.com/9HKWOrmKk8
This is part of a national conversation on racism and violence in the United States, and there were calls to refund and dismantle the police, but there were other views included in the conversation. It has the potential to be another nonviolent moment.
Sadly, despite the successes of the civil rights movement in the United States by 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. found his nonviolent posture challenged
by a black power movement that instead of accelerating change in areas
of social and economic justice brought it to a halt. Reverend King warned black activists not to take the way of the Castros and Che Guevara:
“Riots just don’t pay off,” said King. He pronounced them an objective
failure beyond morals or faith. “For if we say that power is the ability
to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose,” he said, “then it
is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that–no matter how
loud you are, and no matter how much you burn.” Likewise, he exhorted
the staff to combat the “romantic illusion” of guerrilla warfare in the
style of Che Guevara. No “black” version of the Cuban revolution could
succeed without widespread political sympathy, he asserted, and only a
handful of the black minority itself favored insurrection. King extolled
the discipline of civil disobedience instead, which he defined not as a
right but a personal homage to untapped democratic energy. The staff
must “bring to bear all of the power of nonviolence on the economic
problem,” he urged, even though nothing in the Constitution promised a
roof or a meal. “I say all of these things because I want us to know the
hardness of the task,” King concluded, breaking off with his most basic
plea: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at
nonviolence now.”
Critics of nonviolence like to point out that Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968, but fail to mention that he succeeded in transforming the United States into a better country by successfully and nonviolently addressing historic injustices.
What did Reverend King accomplish? He led the successful Montgomery bus boycott that ended segregation on buses in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956. He led the Birmingham campaign in 1963 that faced off with the Birmingham Police Department, led by Eugene “Bull” Connor, who used high-pressure water jets and police attack dogs on children. The campaign ended with Connor losing his job and the city’s discriminatory laws were changed.
Martin Luther King Jr on August 28, 1963
Reverend King played an instrumental role in the August 28, 1963 march on Washington, D.C. with over 250,000 participants. It was done to pressure for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 in Alabama demonstrated African Americans desire to vote. The violence by local authorities, racists, and the Klu Klux Klan and the nonviolent resistance of the civil rights activists were key to passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. These laws gave African Americans political power that had been denied them.
Contrast this with the fires and riots across the country over the past several weeks. Smaller in number than non-violent protests they have too often drowned out those advocating reform and a revolution in values to a person centered society. Today there was light and a conversation while in places like Portland and Seattle, where revolutionaries gunned down young black men, and the police were absent, having been driven out, painfully demonstrated that violence begets violence and does not bring our country closer to the Beloved Community and black lives continue to be unjustly killed. The way of Stokely Carmichael leads to a sterile dead end of bloodshed and violence with the seductive call of revolutionary violence that he embraced in Havana in the 1960s ended with end of this period of civil rights reforms.
Let us also not forget that many who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the 1950s took up arms again against him in the 1960s in an armed struggle that failed wiping out all opposition: violent and nonviolent for years.
A nonviolent movement began to emerge out of Cuba's prisons in the mid 1970s and onto the streets in the mid 1980s yet there are voices that claim that nonviolence hasn't worked and counsel either collaboration with the dictatorship or violent resistance.
Let us compare Reverend King's nonviolent legacy with the violent revolution
that sought to end a dictatorship ninety miles away from U.S. shores in
Cuba that in 1963 was just four years old. Sixty years later and the
Castro dictatorship that replaced the Batista dictatorship is still in
power killing and repressing. Despite fraudulent statistics in areas of health care and education the reality of an ongoing cholera epidemic and the mass exodus of millions of Cubans demonstrates the nightmare
that exists in Cuba today. Today, Cubans are unjustly imprisoned for exercising their human rights and are prisoners of conscience.
Prisoner of Conscience Silverio Portal Contreras beaten and going blind
Silverio Portal Contreras,a former activist with the Ladies in White, is serving a 4-year sentence for "contempt" and "public disorder." According to a court document, he was arrested on the June 20, 2016 in Old Havana after shouting “Down Fidel Castro, down Raúl...” The document states that "the behavior of the accused is particularly offensive because it took place in a touristic area." The document further describes the accused as having “bad social and moral behavior” and mentions that he fails to participate in pro-government activities. According to Silverio’s wife, before his arrest he had campaigned against the collapse of dilapidated buildings in Havana.
Lucinda Gonzalez Gomez, wife of the activist, has put out a desperate plea for help after receiving a call from her husband on June 10, 2020. “Silverio called me and put an official on the phone to explain the situation,” said Gonzalez Gomez to CubaNet. The official told her that “he was taken to the ophthalmologist and because of temporary loss of blood flow, he was losing sight in both eyes.” We fear for Silverio and his life today imprisoned for speaking what he thought.
Hatred and the appeal of revolutionary violence leads to strange bedfellows. The Progressive, a publication founded in 1909 in Madison, Wisconsin on June 18, 2020 published an article titled "Foreign Correspondent: Police Lessons From Cuba" by Reese Erlich that claims "Contrary to the image of brutal and repressive communists, police in Cuba offer an instructive example for activists in the United States."
If the United States adopted the Cuban approach recommended by Mr. Erlich any person recording a police officer, then sharing that image on a digital platform would be violating their right to privacy, and if what they record the police officer doing, whether his or her actions were right or wrong, they would be fined and if they did not pay the fine would be subject to prison.
A
law, patterned after Cuba's, would require those who record police on
or off the job to get the approval of the police officer recorded before
sharing the video with any digital platforms. Thankfully, the First
Amendment prohibits such restrictions in the United States, and also
runs afoul of international human rights instruments such as the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which Cuba is a signatory,
even though the document is censored in the island.
Six days after The Progressive published its essay celebrating Cuban policing in Castro's Cuba, a 27 year old Cuban was shot in the back by a Cuban police man.
Hansel E. Hernández (age 27) killed on June 24, 2020.
On June 24, 2020 in Havana, Cuba Hansel E. Hernández (age 27)was shot in the back and killed by the police while allegedly trying to flee. It took three days for the authorities to report the killing, despite repeated requests for clarity on what had happened.
This would normally have ended silently with no one being the wiser, but Facebook and the courage of a traumatized family member prevented that outcome. On June 25, a woman posted on Facebook a photo of the dead Black youth who, she said, had been the victim of the national revolutionary police a day earlier.
"I feel deep pain for the murder of my nephew Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano committed yesterday morning in La Lima, Guanabacoa (in eastern Havana), by two patrolmen (police)," she wrote. "We, the family members, ask for mercy that this cruel act at the hands of our supposed national security does not go unpunished in any way. Because a police officer, a uniform, does not give the right to murder anyone in such a way. If we know very well that they are trained with personal defense, they must carry spray, tonfas, etc. Why then did they have to resort to their firearm and take a son from a mother, a father, a nephew from their aunt, a brother from their younger sister ... Noting that he was NEVER armed, please, justice.
Facebook post by Hansel's aunt calling for justice.
Hours later, the authorities of the Castro regime released an official statement claiming that the 27-year-old had been caught by a National Revolutionary Police patrol
when, according to the Cuban Ministry of the Interior (MININT), "he was
stealing pieces and accessories from a bus stop", then fleeing. During
the chase "on the run for almost two kilometers, over uneven terrain",
the young man, to avoid being arrested, "attacked one of the policemen
throwing several stones, one of which hit the policeman in the crotch,
another in the side of the torso and a third dislocated his shoulder and
threw him to the floor," indicates the statement posted on social
networks on June 27th. In response to Hansel Hernández's throwing stones, “the soldier fired two warning shots.Immediately
afterwards and due to the danger to his life due to the magnitude of
the aggression, the policeman riposted from the ground, firing a shot
with his regulation weapon that impacts the individual and causes him to
die," continues the official version.
"Over social media demonstrations were announced for June 30 to protest the killing of Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano. The secret police began shutting off internet connections, cell phones and started arbitrarily detaining those who they suspected would take part in the non-violent protests. A number of activists recorded or expressed over social media their intention to take part in the protest action and some were able to message out when they were taken, or had their homes surrounded and laid siege to by state security and were placed under house arrest. This crackdown in which seventy Cubans were targeted successfully "prevented" the non-violent action.
On June 28, 2020 independent Jorge Enrique Rodríguez was arrested and is now being charged with "Fake news" for his reporting on this police killing of a black youth. Other journalists in the lead up to the June 30th planned protests have been detained or laid siege to their homes in order to stop them reporting on the killing of Hansel Ernesto Hernández Galiano and reactions to his death. The Committee to Protect Journalists called for Jorge Enrique's immediate release.
Meanwhile, the Castro regime launched the equivalent of a #BlueLivesMatter campaign that it calls Heroes of the Blue ( #HeroesDeAzul ), but instead of something spontaneous from civil society or a police association this is a systematic campaign of the dictatorship. While at the same time shutting down independent actions as previously mentioned. The tweet above is an example from this campaign.
No video to contradict the version of the dictatorship. Peaceful protests preempted. This is the reality of life under a dictatorship where freedom of speech and assembly do not exist. Is this what progressives want for the United States?
Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros: Died on hungerstrike
Cuban dissident Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on August 7, 2020 in Cuba while in police custody following a 40 day hunger strike. He had been jailed on false charges in the Kilo 8 prison of Camagüey. His body was quickly cremated by the dictatorship without his families consent. Yale professor and author Carlos Eire writing in Babalu Blog highlighted Yosvany's untimely passing and placed it in context:
It’s happened again. Another Cuban dissident has died in prison. Strangely, unlike previous hunger-striking political prisoners who received international attention, Yosvany Arostegui was barely noticed in social media and totally ignored by the world’s news outlets. He joins a long list of hunger-strikers who have been pushed to their deaths by the Castro regime. May his self-immolation in prison be the last, and may he rest in peace and eternal freedom.
Exiled Cuban lawyer and human rights defender Laritza Diversent over Facebook wrote:
I feel deep sadness and pain. I imagine how lonely he felt and how convinced he was that he preferred to exhaust his body until it was turned off. His death reminds me of the thousands of people who, in Cuban prisons, use their body to protest against unjust criminal proceedings. It makes me more aware of all the activists who, like Silverio Portal, are locked up as punishment for exercising their rights to free expression, criticize, protest, meet and associate.
On Friday, August 7, State Security contacted the family of prisoner Yosvany Aróstegui Armenteros to inform them that he had died during a hunger strike that he had carried out for 40 days.
Aróstegui Armenteros had been arrested a year earlier and prosecuted for two common crimes for which he pleaded not guilty from the beginning. Before this last strike he had carried out others with the same objective: to demand his freedom. He is not the first, and I fear while people of good will celebrate a white minority dictatorship in Havana while ignoring its black victims, there will be others. Black Lives Matter and that should include Black Cuban Lives too.
Yosvany Aróstegui Armenteros died on hunger strike on August 7, 2020
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," said Martin Luther King Jr., and he was right.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.,
like Gandhi before him, was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Another courageous man of Christian faith, inspired by Reverend King's nonviolent legacy, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and Harold Cepero, a youth leader from his movement who had been a seminarian were martyred on
July 22, 2012 for advocating nonviolent change in Cuba. Oswaldo had
managed to obtain more than 25,000 signatures in a Stalinist
dictatorship demanding a vote to change the system and recognize the
rights and dignity of Cubans. Like Martin Luther King Jr. he was killed but his ideas and example live on to inspire others.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas
Meanwhile, Raul Castro survived to the present day hanging on to power and
prepares to turn it over to a new generation of Castros, as his brother had passed it on to him before, as the island of Cuba sinks into misery
and despair, and humanitarian aid gathered in Miami and delivered to Havana by Oswaldo's daughter, Rosa María Payá Acevedo is blocked from being delivered to Cubans in need by the Castro dictatorship.
Rosa María Payá Acevedo carries on her dad's legacy
A dictatorship that claims to advocate for social justice
but silences those who wished to nonviolently protest the shooting in the back of a young unarmed black man by the Revolutionary National Police. A regime that in the midst of hunger rejects aid sitting at a port in Havana.
"All prisoners shall be treated with the respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings." - Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners, United Nations 1990 Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros and the continuing six decade tragedy of political prisoners in Cuba
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in his 1861 book, The House of the Dead
that "the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering
its prisons." What does this say about the Cuban government that has
barred the International Committee of the Red Cross from visiting Cuba's prisons for decades?
Cuban dissident Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on August 7, 2020 in Cuba while in police custody following a 40 day hunger strike. He had been jailed on false charges in the Kilo 8 prison of Camagüey. His body was quickly cremated by the dictatorship.
Yale professor and author Carlos Eire writing in Babalu Blog highlighted Yosvany's untimely passing and placed it in context:
It’s happened again. Another Cuban dissident has died in prison. Strangely, unlike previous hunger-striking political prisoners who received international attention, Yosvany Arostegui was barely noticed in social media and totally ignored by the world’s news outlets. He joins a long list of hunger-strikers who have been pushed to their deaths by the Castro regime. May his self-immolation in prison be the last, and may he rest in peace and eternal freedom.
Exiled Cuban lawyer and human rights defender Laritza Diversent over Facebook wrote:
I feel deep sadness and pain. I imagine how lonely he felt and how convinced he was that he preferred to exhaust his body until it was turned off. His death reminds me of the thousands of people who, in Cuban prisons, use their body to protest against unjust criminal proceedings. It makes me more aware of all the activists who, like Silverio Portal, are locked up as punishment for exercising their rights to free expression, criticize, protest, meet and associate.
On Friday, August 7, State Security contacted the family of prisoner Yosvany Aróstegui Armenteros to inform them that he had died during a hunger strike that he had carried out for 40 days.
Aróstegui Armenteros had been arrested a year earlier and prosecuted for two common crimes for which he pleaded not guilty from the beginning. Before this last strike he had carried out others with the same objective: to demand his freedom.
Orlando Zapata Tamayo
As in the case of Orlando Zapata Tamayo (February 2010), Aróstegui Armenteros was transferred to Kilo 8 prison from another prison and then transferred to the Prison ward of the Amalia Simoni Hospital in the city of Camagüey. Authorities at the Kilo 8 Prison have a torture system to subject prisoners who go on strike: they isolate them, and take away their water, the only sustenance of any striker.
In the case of Zapata and thanks to pressure from opposition groups outside the Amalia Simoni hospital, his mother was able to see him and learn from his lips about the torture and denial of water to which he had been subjected.
Yosvany Aróstegui did not have the same luck. His brother, Yaudel Aróstegui Armenteros was not allowed to see him.
“Ten days before he died, they called my brother Yaudel Arostegui Armenteros, at the hospital to appear there, when he arrived at Amalia Simoni they told him that my brother was very ill. My brother couldn't see him. A doctor who was there told my brother that the next call they were going to make would not be good, it was because he was going to die. And so it was,” Raidel Aróstegui Armenteros, who lives in exile in the state of Washington, United States, told the Center.
According to Raidel, his brother always said he was innocent of the common crimes he was accused of. The family hired an attorney who conducted investigations into the case, but a week before the trial, the attorney mysteriously died in a traffic accident.
His brother always thought he would be released, but upon receiving the 15-year prison sentence he began a series of hunger strikes."My brother Yosvany Arostegui was a human rights activist. He was always confronting the political police. In Camagüey his actions bothered the political police. He always told me that the day something happened to him that he was going to plant himself in protest. That the day they did something to him, he was going to be planted and that the second Zapata in Camagüey was going to be him. And so it happened. Look how his death was,” he added.
During this dictatorship of more than sixty-one years of the Castros, dozens of political and common prisoners have died on hunger strike as a result of the denial of water and medical assistance, in addition to the cruel treatment to which those who decide to denounce the disrespect of their human rights were subjected to.
The Center for a Free Cuba has denounced this case to international human rights organizations and demanded an independent investigation into the death of Yosvany Aróstegui Armenteros.
In the aftermath of Cuban dissident Yosvany Arostegui’s death, artist and activist Tania Bruguera has called for a virtual “chorus of voices” to acknowledge and honor the political prisoners in Cuba. On her Facebook page yesterday, she posted a list of 102 current prisoners and asked supporters to record themselves reading the names out loud, uploading the videos with the hashtags #JusticiaParaYosvani (#JusticeForYovani) and #CoroPresosPoliticosCuba (#ChorusPoliticalPrisonersCuba).
The Center is encouraging others to participate in this initiative by the Cuban artist.
"To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night
Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on hunger strike on August 7, 2020
Long time Cuban dissident Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros died on Friday, August 7, 2020 in Cuba while in police custody following a 40 day hunger strike. He had been jailed on false charges in the Kilo 8 prison of Camagüey. His body was quickly cremated by the dictatorship.
Yale professor and author Carlos Eire writing in Babalu Blog highlighted Yosvany's untimely passing and placed it in context:
It’s happened again. Another Cuban dissident has died in prison. Strangely, unlike previous hunger-striking political prisoners who
received international attention, Yosvany Arostegui was barely noticed
in social media and totally ignored by the world’s news outlets. He joins a long list of hunger-strikers who have been pushed to their deaths by the Castro regime. May his self-immolation in prison be the last, and may he rest in peace and eternal freedom.
Exiled Cuban lawyer and human rights defender Laritza Diversent over Facebook wrote:
I feel deep sadness and pain.I imagine how lonely he felt and how convinced he was that he preferred to exhaust his body until it was turned off.His death reminds me of the thousands of people who, in Cuban prisons, use their body to protest against unjust criminal proceedings.It makes me more aware of all the activists who, like Silverio Portal, are locked up as punishment for exercising their rights to free expression, criticize, protest, meet and associate.
Particulars about Yovany's case are now emerging and being reported on, but it is important to remember that the Castro regime's repressive practices have led to several hunger strike deaths over the years along with efforts to slander the dead, and cover up what happened.
However there are two cases that the Castro regime failed to silence that aroused international attention and concern within the Cuban diaspora.
Pedro Luis Boitel was a student leader who fought by Fidel Castro's side to bring an end to the Batista
dictatorship and restore Cuban democracy. However as Castro came to
impose a communist regime on Cuba and abolished academic freedom and independent student activism at the University of Havana dissidents emerged. One of the most well known
and popular among students opposing the new regime was Pedro Luis and he was sent to prison for 11 years in 1961. He
served his sentence, but the dictatorship refused to free him. This
drove Pedro to start a hunger strike that ended in his death on May 25,1972 after 53 days.
"My
dear brothers in the internal opposition in Cuba. I have many things to
say to you, but I did not want to do it with paper and ink, because I
hope to go to you one day when our country is free without the Castro
dictatorship. Long live human rights, with my blood I wrote to you so
that this be saved as evidence of the savagery we of the Pedro Luis Boitel political prisoners [movement] are subjected to and
are victims of."*
On May 18, 2004
Orlando Zapata Tamayo, Virgilio Marante Güelmes, and Raúl Arencibia
Fajardo were each sentenced to three years in prison for contempt for authority, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in a one-day trial. This did not silence him. When prison officials chose to attack his
human dignity, and engaged in acts of physical and psychological
torture, Orlando Zapata would respond with nonviolent defiance. He
carried out hunger strikes within the prisons he was transferred to. The
regime's response to his nonviolent defiance was to pile on prison
years to his sentence. Between May 2004 and December 2009 they carried
out nine trials without due process guarantees for a total sentence of
25 years and six months.
Cuban human rights defender Orlando Zapata Tamayo's hunger strike in 2009-2010 placed a national and international focus on human rights in Cuba that within two years led to the release of 75 other Cuban prisoners of conscience arrested along with him in March of 2003. Efforts by the Castro dictatorship to slander the martyred prisoner of conscience failed.
Wilman Villar Mendoza was arrested on November14, 2011 during a violent
crackdown by the political police on nonviolent Cuban democrats. Wilman
and the others had engaged in a public protest in the town of Contramaestre in Santiago, Cuba on November 2, 2011.
Ten days later in a closed-door, one day sham trial on November 24
Wilman was sentenced to four years in prison for disobedience,
resisting arrest and contempt and was sent to Aguadores prison.
Outraged
at the injustice committed against him Wilman launched a hunger strike
on November 25, 2011 and refused to wear the uniform of a common
prisoner. There was little press coverage or official protests
regarding his plight until his death appeared imminent.
Ladies
in White and other opposition activists marched and demonstrated on his
behalf suffering brutal beatings and detentions but the international
press remained silent. Now that he has died, as was done in the case of
Orlando Zapata Tamayo in 2010, some in the internationalmedia reported on it, but not to the degree that hey had with Orlando's case.
Plaque in memory of Roberto López Chávez
The Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights has documented other Cuban political prisoners who
have died on hunger strike on Cuba that little to nothing is known about:
Roberto López Chávez, 25 years old, died on December 11, 1966 in Isla de Pinos prison on hunger strike without medical assistance.Armando Valladares, in his prison memoir, Against All Hope described the
circumstances surrounding his death: “When Roberto López Chávez, went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses in
the prison, the guards withheld water from him until he became
delirious, twisting on the floor and begging for something to drink.
[...] He died the next day.”
Olegario Charlot Pileta, died in the infamous "Escaleras" (staircase) of the Boniato prison, in of January 1973 during a hunger strike, without medical assistance and is described in documents as a “black youth.”
Enrique García Cuevasdied on a hunger strike, without receiving medical care, in cell No. 4 of the new Provincial Jail of Santa Clara, on June 24, 1973.
Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros joins a long list known and unknown of dissidents who have died on hunger strike protesting their unjust imprisonment and terrible prison conditions.
Keilylli de la Mora Valle: Life in danger in Cuba
There is also continuing great concern for a young activist and political prisoner Keilylli de la Mora Valle who has been on and off hunger strikes protesting her unjust imprisonment and terrible conditions.
Silverio Portal, prisoner of conscience, going blind in a Cuban prison
We are also concerned for the life of Silverio Portal, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience who is losing his eye sight and is in poor health.
These cases need to be looked at within the larger context of the prison system in Cuba today. Cuba in 2020: World's largest per capita prison population.
Cuba, under the Castros, continues to be the one country in the
Americas that has not allowed the Red Cross in to inspect its prisons since 1989, and Amnesty International is barred by the dictatorship from visiting the island.
There is one spot in Cuba that has not escaped scrutiny, but that is because it is a U.S. military base.
The world knows of the human rights situation in the prisons at the U.S.
Guantanamo Naval Base because access has been granted. The reason that so much is known and documented is because the International Committee of the Red Cross has visited the Guantanamo detention facility over 100 times since 2001 when the United States government began housing detainees.
Over
that time there have been zero visits by the International Red Cross to
Cubans prisons, and what we do know is limited and incomplete, but
should arouse deep concern.
According to a January 13, 2020 report in The New York Times
a former high-ranking judge in Cuba
provided
documents which "showed that approximately 92
percent of those accused in the more than 32,000 cases that go to trial
in Cuba every year are found guilty. Nearly 4,000 people every year are
accused of being “antisocial” or “dangerous,” terms the Cuban government
uses to jail people who pose a risk to the status quo, without having
committed a crime." Furthermore, the article says that "records show
that Cuba’s prison system holds more than 90,000 prisoners. The Cuban
government has only publicly released the figure once, in 2012, when it claimed that 57,000 people were jailed."
There is cause for great international concern. Consider that there are: no legal guarantees to a fair trial, fundamental rights trampled upon, no outside scrutiny from the Red Cross and a communist dictatorship along with a huge prison population and political prisoners have been dying on hunger strikes for decades.
Let us hope that the untimely death of Yosvany Arostegui Armenteros draws calls for the International Committee of the Red Cross to be given access to all prisons in Cuba.
Below is a video in Spanish of Cuban dissident Jose Daniel Ferrer announcing the death of Yosvany, and denouncing the slanders of the regime.
Posts
