Posted on 07/31/2003 1:03:38 AM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
These are excerpts from a letter from dissident Juan Carlos González Leyva, who is blind, from his prison in Holguin, Cuba. Recorded by his wife, Maritza Calderín, the letter was recently presented at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
To Sylvia Iriondo [of Mothers and Women Against Repression]: After 13 months in prison, I have not been tried or sentenced by any court even as efforts have been made to persuade me to betray God and human rights and to collaborate with the government.
Since mid-December, state security used inmate Joel Prado de la Torre (as he called himself) to throw in my cell a substance that produced a burning sensation on the skin and nasal congestion, a great deal of phlegm and bronchial inflammation. This situation still continues. . . .
Since January, they have added another substance to the sawdust they throw at me. This one gives me the sensation of millions of bugs constantly running all over me. It causes a great deal of itching and prevents me from sleeping.
I don't know if this is a biological substance or a chemical agent. But I know that it is not insects because when I touch my skin there are no actual bugs that I can feel -- although the sensation is palpable.
Normally, the sawdust shower is a daily occurrence. Yesterday it started around 6 p.m. when I was on my knees praying. The sensation is that of a multitude of bugs suddenly coming down on my face and my body. This torment continues until 2 or 3 in the morning. . . .
The inmate follows me everywhere. I have to eat out of a can that I try to keep covered all the time, because he will throw the nausea-provoking substance into the food.
Sometimes I feel as if I have a chain attached to my body and the weight of the world on my shoulders. I feel that I am going to collapse, that I cannot take this any more. But I pray to God, and Jesus Christ gives me strength. It is a constant struggle, a constant torture.
On Feb. 1, I placed my mattress in front of the cell's iron-bar doors to get some fresh air. Officer Fabú, unit chief, snatched the mattress away from me, threw me on the floor, took me by the neck and dragged me. He told me that if I wanted to sleep, I could sleep on the bare floor with the dirt, other prisoner's shoes, roaches, ants, mice, etc.
One night they threw so much of the substance into the cell that it was as if the walls were boiling. So I had to retreat to my bed and resign myself to do without the little bit of fresh air that I was getting through the iron bars.
The substance also causes acute pain in both of my eye sockets. The pain is so severe that at times it seems my eyes are popping out. Everyday, the unit chief threatens me with death if I continue the hunger strike to protest the prosecution's request of eight years in prison.
They do not allow me to speak to my attorney, and I do not have religious assistance or access to any information. I am only allowed to listen to the ''round tables'' and the state-run newscasts. For the skeptics, I can say that hell does exist, and Satan shows all of his faces in here.
In here, I listen to the weeping of young and old women, their terrible and frightful laments forever embedded in my mind. They plead because they are locked in cells that are like drawers where are held men, women, the elderly, the sick and the incapacitated.
They plead because the four walls become a grave site.
These are catacombs where people scream but the sound is drowned out by a hermetically sealed metal door. When the women plead, the prison guards laugh and say: ``What they want is a man.''
If prisoners go into crisis, they are injected with tranquilizers; and they are not moved out until a confession is forced from them, whether they are guilty or not. This is a dismal world. One cannot realize what it is like unless one lives it first-hand. . . .
I trust God and our Lord Jesus Christ to give me the strength to face any situation, whether to live in squalor as I live now or to die and meet my Lord and my God.
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