Andy Frometa Cuenca -- whom I first profiled this past May -- has been imprisoned in the Castro gulag since he was 16. He is now 35, but his prison sentence is far from half over.
If he remains in the horrid conditions he is forced to suffer at the Guantanamo prison known as "the white shark," he will die before he completes his sentence.
In a post published Sept. 18, 2011, on PayoLibre.com, Cuban independent journalist and activist Caridad Caballero Batista writes that Frometa is suffering from progressive myopia that is threatening his eyesight and from severe pain in his legs.
Maybe it has something to do with conditions in his cell, which is 10 feet wide and 6 1/2 feet long, smells like shit, is unventilated and the temperature is about 97 degrees. As of Oct. 14, he as been kept in punishment cells like this and at other prisons for 13 years.
What did Frometa do to earn such antipathy from his jailers and the Castro regime they serve?
At age 16, Frometa was arrested and imprisoned for illegally trying to leave the country. (Yes, Cuba spends as much effort trying to keep Cubans in Cuba as it does trying to keep intruders out -- if anyone were so inclined to try to sneak into Cuba!)
While Frometa has been in jail, the regime has stacked various other sentences onto his time because of his anti-Castro stances and activities as a member of the Pedro Luis Boitel political prisoner movement.
As of September 2011, those sentences add up to more than 46 years.
Which means that if the Castro regime survives, and Frometa survives the Castro regime, he will be 62 years old when he is released.
A life sentence for nothing more than trying to escape the hell into which he was born.
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