“Hunger Strikes Were the Only Way I Could Make a Demand”
Opposition leader Pedro Albert who was released from prison after eleven days of protest, talks to ’14ymedio’
HAVANA TIMES – Activist Pedro Albert Sanchez was released last Thursday from prison in San Miguel del Padrón, Havana, after spending eleven days on hunger strike. The dissident was to appear before the Guanabacoa Prosecutor’s Office on Tuesday to find out his legal situation, but the hurricane alert may have postponed the process. He spoke with 14ymedio about his time in prison and his most immediate plans.
“Hunger strikes were the only resource they left me to protest,” says Albert Sánchez about the successive hunger strikes he has undertaken over the years and specifically about the one he began on October 20 while he was in prison. “It is the only tool that State Security has left me and with it I have defended my right to exist.”
After more than ten days without eating, the opposition activist was released on October 31 without the prison authorities informing him of his current situation. This Tuesday, the activist should know more details about the status of his five-year prison sentence for participating in the popular protests of 11 July 2021 (’11J’). If the meeting takes place, amid the weather conditions due to the proximity of Hurricane Rafael, State Security agents (SE) could be waiting for him at the site.
“I have never agreed to any kind of interrogation” with the political police, clarifies the professor, who nevertheless acknowledges his willingness to talk “with anyone about the situation Cuba is going through” and possible solutions for the future. “As for threats, warnings or promises,” he knows that many times these offers from the SE agents are “loaded with poison.”
His time in prison, initially for a year in Valle Grande Prison and later for eleven months in Prison 1580, both in Havana, has been “a real school for getting to know Cuba, better than if he watched television or read the newspapers every day.” Contact with the inmates, some of whom were imprisoned for political reasons and most for common crimes, has shaped Albert Sanchez’s view of the island.
“I spent a year in Valle Grande and I saw my country from prison. I had already seen it from the classroom as a student, as a teacher, as the father of my children and as a teaching staff,” he describes. “From Prison I have seen Cuba from an incredibly informative place. Kids from all houses come there and I was in the admission area where the prisoners enter and spend ten days or more until they are taken to the galleys or the camps.”
“I have shared with embezzlers, pickpockets, beach bums, people who specialize in stealing on the beach, and others who steal motorcycles. I have shared with the best and the worst of each house,” he explained. “I have seen the total collapse of this regime from the galleys, I have lived in the country and I have felt the change in the country from contact with the prisoners. I have attended a sociology seminar there.”
In December of last year, Albert Sánchez was returned to prison after the Havana Enforcement Court revoked his limited freedom sentence that allowed him to serve his five-year prison sentence for protesting on 11 June outside a penitentiary.
The opposition figure, a prostate cancer patient, had been arrested in November 2023 in Havana when he was trying to deliver a letter addressed to Eamon Gilmore, High Representative for Human Rights of the European Union (EU), who was visiting Cuba at the time. After his arrest, he was transferred to the Detention Center known as the Vivac de Calabazar.
The activist’s clashes with the Cuban regime go back a long way. In October 2022, after leaving Valle Grande prison, he described part of his journey: “Since 2007 I have been concerned about the closed circle, analogous to a vicious circle, where the economy declines, discontent and protests grow, repression grows. As repression grows, the logistical infrastructure to implement it and justify it has to grow. This implies that it has to feed off that economy, and the cycle repeats itself.”
Translated by Translating Cuba.