When it comes to torture and holding prisoners incommunicado, the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay has nothing on the Castro gulag's outpost on the other side of the base's boundary, the Combinado de Guantanamo prison. Read this great piece by Mauricio Claver-Carone, and then decide where the real crimes are being committed, and by whom.
Coincidentally, Cuban human rights activist/independent journalist Juan Carlos González Leiva filed a report describing how guards at Combinado de Guantanamo recently assaulted political prisoner Ricardo Galván Casal.
Galván, who in April was sentenced to 3 years in prison, was beaten after he wrote on the walls of his cell, Abajo Fidel and abajo tiranía — "Down with Fidel" and "down with tyranny." Galván was protesting the removal from his cell a water heater that had been prescribed by government doctors.
In response, several guards grabbed Galván and rubbed him against the walls, in some bizarre attempt to erase the slogans.
Sloganeering was the "crime" that landed Galván in the gulag. A member of the Cuban Youth Movement for Democracy, Galván was arrested and convicted of "disrespect," after several bumper stickers and other signs proclaiming CAMBIO, or "change," started showing up around the town of Baracoa, in far eastern Cuba.
There's only one prison with the word "Guantanamo" in its name, where you will find inmates guilty of that.
Read my Political Prisoner of the Week profile of Galván, here.
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