Cuba: The 3-year nightmare in the country’s prisons experienced by a journalist convicted of “enemy propaganda”

Seven hundred paper leaflets fly from a balcony on a busy intersection in the popular neighborhood of Centro Habana.

It is 11 in the morning on Monday, June 14, 2021.

Many passers-by walk by indifferently, while others pick up the pamphlets to read their contents.

“The people demand free elections”, “Freedom for political prisoners”, “Thinking differently is not a crime”, “Down with communism” or “The time has come” are some of the slogans printed along with quotes from Cuban heroes José Martí and Antonio Maceo.

Less than 24 hours later, journalist and dissident Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca, who had co-organized and filmed this protest act, was arrested.

It is the beginning of his passage of three years by Cuban prisons that he describes as “hell.”

Rock Valley He received freedom in exchange for exile to the United Stateswhere he arrived at the beginning of June with his wife, fellow activist Eralidis Frómeta.

From a relative’s house in Philadelphia, where they have temporarily settled, he recounts in dialogue with BBC Mundo the precarious conditions of the prisons, the degrading treatment and the attacks suffered.

The BBC contacted representatives of the Cuban government by phone and email to obtain their position on the alleged abuses in the prison system and the specific case of Valle Roca, but did not receive a response.

Havana, in any case, has always denied that human rights violations are committed in its prisons.

Valle Roca, 63, is a well-known activist with a long history of opposition to the communist system in force in Cuba since the 1959 Revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.

As a journalist he collaborated with several media, including the opposition Radio and TV Martí based in Miami, and together with his wife he founded “Delibera” in 2018, a small platform with content against the Cuban government and pro-democracy.

Despite his criticism of the regime for almost three decades, until 2021 the longest time he had spent locked up, he claims, was 15 days in a police cell in Havana.

But in June of that year he decided to move from words to action: “We had already prepared the leaflets. I was in charge of filming what was done while my partner was throwing the papers,” he remembers.

Delibera published the recording of the pamphlet launch in a YouTube video.

The next day they arrested Valle Roca and took him to the Villa Marista barracks, headquarters of the State Security apparatus (counterintelligence) of the Ministry of the Interior, where, according to his story, They beat him up and put him in a cell..

There he spent the first 50 days of his confinement “without medication and eating poorly, since the police seized all the food that my wife brought me,” he says.

From his cell he learned about the almost unprecedented protests of July 11, 2021 – the largest in six decades in Cuba – “from what my jailers were talking about, who were very nervous and commented on what was happening.”

“Knowing that the people had taken to the streets gave me strength, I felt like I had to be alive.“I couldn’t die,” he says.

After 50 days in Villa Marista, they transferred him to the Combinado del Este maximum security prison, on the eastern outskirts of Havana, and they told him the charges against him: “enemy propaganda” and “resistance”the latter for allegedly resisting arrest, something he denies.

The Combinado del Este, which houses part of the inmates imprisoned for political reasons, is one of the most feared prisons from Cuba.

It ranked first on the list of reports of rights violations in penitentiary centers compiled this month by the Cuban Prison Documentation Center.

The NGO denounced the “critical health situation, lack of medicines and terrible medical care” of this and other prisons on the island, as well as the hunger and harassment suffered by the inmates.

Recent testimonies suggest that the serious economic crisis that Cuba is suffering – with a pressing shortage of food and medicine – is reducing the rations provided to the prison population to the minimum necessary to survive.

In his video call with BBC Mundo, Valle Roca shows a small white plastic cup and points to approximately one third of its capacity.

“This is the ration of rice they give you at the Combinado del Este, along with a kind of hash that is all water and smells bad. in the rice You can find everything from insects to parts of mice or lizards“, it states.

The dissident explains that they fed him tiny rations twice a day, in addition to a glass of juice for breakfast.

Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca looks thinner and more emaciated today compared to the photographs prior to his time in prison, in which He went from weighing about 80 kilos to only 53, as he claims.

“I had no medical assistance of any kind. I had my treatment for hypertension but they didn’t provide it to me, they didn’t even give me aspirin,” he laments.

He claims that, in addition to hypertension, in prison he contracted sclerosis in the aorta, chronic pneumonia and a cyst in the gallbladder, as well as a deviation in the septum due to the beating of a guard.

“He treated us in a degrading way. One day I answered him and he went up to me to hit me,” she says.

After a year behind bars, Valle Roca’s trial was held in June 2022 in a court in Havana, where prosecutors requested 6 years in prison for him.

“Everything was irregular. There were diplomats and press who wanted to go and were not allowed. I had given witnesses and they were not summoned”, assures the journalist.

International institutions and organizations have on several occasions questioned the legitimacy of the judicial processes in Cuba.

The UN recently issued a letter based on a report by the NGO Prisoners Defenders in which it denounces, among other irregularities, the deprivation of liberty without judicial protection, the lack of independent lawyersthe subordination of justice to political power and the improper use of military courts and summary processes.

This conditions all criminal cases in the country and, more specifically, the fate of prisoners sentenced for acts of dissidence, most of them detained as a result of the historic protests of July 11, 2021.

Those demonstrations were followed a campaign of police summonses, arrests, trials and imprisonment to citizens critical of the government that lasts until today, according to organizations.

Prisoners Defenders posted in May More than 1,100 political prisoners in the island’s prisons, including dozens of minors, serving sentences under harsh conditions for crimes such as “sedition”, “contempt”, “enemy propaganda” or “sabotage”.

The Cuban government denies that there are irregularities and assures that its judicial system is clean and impartial.

In July 2022, Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca He received his sentence: 5 years in prisonof which I had already completed one.

After almost three of his five years of his sentence, the United States Embassy in Havana granted him a humanitarian visa and the Cuban authorities agreed to release him in exchange for him leaving the country.

“Since they arrested him, they told me that if he agreed to leave Cuba, he would not be prosecuted. Both he and I refused to leave and he chose to be prosecuted. But three years later, his health reached the limit and the best option was save the life of Lazarus and accept the proposal”, explains his wife, Eralidis Frómeta, to BBC Mundo.

On June 6, the couple arrived at the Miami airport, and shortly after they headed to Philadelphia.

Although they are safe in exile, they are worried about possible reprisals against their family on the island.

“We know what our family is exposed to, because one of the things the police told us is to remember that we left my daughter and grandchildren behindthat we saw what we were going to do here in the United States,” says Frómeta.

Asked about his new life plan in the North American country, Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca answers that for now he will need to undergo medical and psychological treatment to heal the after-effects of his three years in prison.

Later, he does not rule out resuming his political fight.

“Let’s see how we do it, because in any case I am going to continue fighting, I will have something in mind. I will look for something I can do to contribute to ending that dictatorship,” she proclaims.

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