Leaving Prison in Cuba Does Not Mean Being Free
“They have left the small prison to enter the big prison,” said an elderly Cuban woman on Thursday.
HAVANA TIMES – In the last few hours, more than thirty Cuban political prisoners have been released. The number is just a small part of the 553 people who will be released from their cells after the agreement between the Havana regime and the Vatican which led to the United States removing the island from the list of countries sponsoring terrorism. On this side of the bars, the prisoners are awaited by their families but also by a country where dissent continues to be a crime.
Among those who have left the cells are internationally recognized opponents such as José Daniel Ferrer, leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, citizens who only protested peacefully in the streets such as Luis Robles, known as “the young man with the placard,” and very poor people from the Havana neighborhood of La Güinera who on 11 July 2021 (11J) demonstrated demanding change and chanting the word “freedom.” It is expected that in the coming days more locks will be removed and other dungeons will be opened.
The joy, however, has been dampened. Organizations that have been working for years on a database of political prisoners warn that there are more than a thousand people convicted of these crimes on the island. To these alarming numbers we must add that the current releases are not full freedoms but a partial measure with serious limitations on rights. If those who benefit from this decision incur in any “indiscipline,” they can be returned to prison. Hanging over their heads is the return to the locked cells, the meager rations of food and the mistreatment of the guards.
The lives of these prisoners will also be very difficult in a nation that has experienced an intensification of controls and official intolerance in recent years. With an economic crisis that seems to have no end, a mass exodus that also does not stop and a ruling elite anchored to ideological continuity, walking through Cuban streets is not very different from spending the days in a prison. “They have left the small prison to enter the big prison,” said an elderly woman on Thursday standing in one of those endless lines to buy food. The rest of those waiting in line nodded in silence.
For those less known and, therefore, barely protected by international visibility, everything will be more difficult. For example, Yaquelín Cruz García, mother of Dariel Cruz García aged 23, told me this Thursday how she experienced the first 24 hours after the release of the young man, convicted for the 11J protests. The woman says that she is happy to finally have El Bolo, as his friends also know him, at her side, although she fears that “something will happen and they will want to put him back in jail.”
Cruz García feels that the anxiety continues. “He is under a conditional release regime and he has to follow the rules imposed on him,” explains the mother. “If my son had been given total freedom and could leave the country, I would do everything possible to get him out of Cuba as soon as possible, even if it were to go to Haiti,” she says. Her fear is not exaggerated. An invisible shackle surrounds the ankle of all the released prisoners.
Translated by Translating Cuba.
Jose I tried to write you but the email bounces back. Your post is far too much of a generalization. You need to explain better and not throw all Cubans in Miami or the US in the same sack.
Miami Cubans are desperate to keep honest Cubans in jail.