Castro's Prisoners Protest With Self-Abuse

NewsMax ^ | 12/1/05 | NewsMax

[wagglebee]

Thanks to the horrendous treatment they suffer at the hands of brutal jailers at Fidel Castro’s prisons, some prisoners in Cuba are resorting to extreme forms of protest -- including self-mutilation -- as a means to attract international attention to their plight.

According to Miami’s El Nuevo Herald newspaper, protests have included:

• A lawyer and independent journalist imprisoned for two years carved the letters "I" and "L" into his forehead, proclaiming that he was "inocente," or "innocent," and demanding "libertad," or "liberty." According to the newspaper, one the cuts became badly infected.

  Prior to these acts of self-mutilation, El Nuevo reported that the man twice attempted suicide in jail by trying to strangle himself with a plastic cord. He remains in one of Castro's lock-ups, condemned to a 20-year sentence.

• Another prisoner, Manuel Fiallo, slashed himself to protest prisoners' lack of medical care, according to a Cuban prison diary published in recent days on a Miami-based Cuban pro-democracy site, Payolibre.com. Fiallo reportedly slashed his veins in protest and was subsequently thrown into a punishment cell by prison guards and left to bleed to death as his screams went ignored by prison authorities.

• In April, NewsMax.com reported that inmates at the Combinado del Este prison, which houses thousands of inmates, set mattresses and other materials ablaze in violence that left several prisoners seriously injured.

  According to the New York Sun, leaders of the Cuban pro-democracy movement say they have seen a dramatic increase in such reports. The prisoners' desperate behavior, activists told the Sun, is a response both to Castro’s increasingly harsh restrictions on Cubans' freedoms and new levels of abuse inside his prisons.

  "The prisoners are pleading to the world to pay attention as they work for liberty," one of Cuba's leading pro-democracy activists, Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, told the Sun.

  In a report issued in March, Amnesty International revealed:

• "During 2004, at least nine prisoners were reported to have been held continuously in walled-in punishment cells for periods between two and four months. Such cells are said to be very small with no natural light and no furniture; they lack sanitary provisions including drinking water. The prisoners are not allowed out to receive visitors or to exercise, and sometimes are not permitted to wear any clothing nor given any bedding.

• Normando Hernández González was held in a punishment cell for four months as a punitive measure after ending a 17-day hunger strike to protest against his transfer to another prison.
• Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta, serving a sentence of 20 years, was reportedly beaten in October 2004 by a group of guards while handcuffed. The guards reportedly stamped on his neck which caused him to pass out. He went on hunger strike in protest.

  Writing in the Washington Times in April 2005 Rep. By Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., charged that "Day after day, year after year, Cubans of all ages, races and beliefs are arrested and left to languish in jail cells for exercising fundamental rights that we take for granted, such as drafting a document that criticizes the Cuban communist regime's repressive policies, to calling for free elections on the island.

  "Journalists, poets, civil society, labor unions, mothers, fathers, students, farmers all live under the dark cloud of a terrorist regime and suffer under conditions we could not imagine. The rights of freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of religion and all of the other rights that free men and women enjoy are denied to the Cuban people."

  She added that "men are dragged down the stairs of one of hundreds of Castro's notorious jails, thrown in squalid cells, beaten and tortured. Women are raped, humiliated and beaten."

[wagglebee]

Of course as long as Castro doesn't put panties on anybody's head, he will remain a hero to the American left.

[The Radical Capitalist]

I self-abuse myelf every night..what's the big deal?

[peyton randolph]

Self-abuse? Wouldn't that lead to blindness or hairy palms?

[atomicpossum]

I'm reminded of a famous scene in Blazing Saddles...

[flashbunny]

"take a whack at tyranny"

[coconutt2000]

Keep in mind that the Liberals dream of the day that they'll be able to toss us into similar prisons.

No, not all liberals... just their true believers, who believe that conservatives and patriots are the bane of their existence.

[atomicpossum]

[Regulator]

Complain all you want.

Sr. Castro's protectors in the USSR are long gone. They never particularly liked him that much anyway.

So we have a "Right wing" President (it's been alleged), a "Right Wing" Senate (only Kennedy thinks that), and a "Right Wing" House (which may be close to true).

How come Castro is still there?

[Savage Beast]

"Europeans fixate on American interrogations of captive murderous terrorists but remain silent about thousands who have been killed, tortured or forgotten in Fidel Castro's gulag a few miles away."
~Victor Davis Hanson~
Jewish World Review, December 1, 2005

[commonasdirt]

WOW! We are rebels and did not even know it. I raise a free (hairy palmed) hand in solidarity

[wagglebee]

Castro's atrocities have gone unfettered for four and a half decades, and it is disgusting. Reagan's only two shortcomings were not responding when the Islamofascist terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon and allowing Castro to remain in power.

[Landry Fan]

and Code Pink is falling all over themselves to honor Castro this New Year's. barf.

[austinmark]

I'm Shocked! How can this be???

The MSN has been twisting my arm (so to speak) for month's now, telling me It's "America that's Evil" & that "ONLY the United States TORTURES Prisoner's!"

Could I have been duped by the Liberal, Anti-American Press???


/sarcasm

[ExcursionGuy84]

...and in the meantime, Al-Qaeda & Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are still getting their orange-glazed chicken dinners....

...which I full-heartedly agree with as JESUS commanded in Luke 6:27-28.

[tgslTakoma]

I posted some comments on Code Pink's celebratory trip on an earlier thread on same story, different source (NY Sun) here.

Luis Gonzalez said that he would pass the trip info on to Rep. Ros-Lehtinen.

I hope the story gets further coverage.

[japaneseghost]

Serious bragging rights, BUMP

(you gotta read into this, can't say it aloud)

[Syberyenta]

well don't that beat all?

[RichInOC]

Note to NewsMax: That was a singularly unfortunate choice of words.

[Irishguy]

MUHAHAHHA

exactly what i thought...

i thought, guys in prison 'spanking the monkey' to protest fidel...what next! that image is priceless...actually dont think that!


i think i have heard all excuses now...:)) I suppose all liberal teenagers caught now can say they are protesting the iraq war and it has nothing to do with the centrefold, she is just assisting the cause!