Posted on 06/05/2003 4:27:24 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
HAVANA - Dissident journalist Manuel Vazquez Portal tells of rats, bad food and a tiny cell in a diary smuggled out of prison by his wife, providing a rare look at life behind bars in Cuba.
Vazquez described his cell's furnishings as a rickety cot, a dirty mattress without sheets and pillow, a fetid toilet bowl. Rats scurry across the floor and water drips down the walls, he wrote.
"The cell is a space of 1 1/2 meters wide by 3 meters long (about 5 feet by 10 feet)," Vazquez wrote in one entry. "A barred door partially covered by a plate of steel. A barred window, through which enters the sun's rays, the rain, the insects."
While Vazquez reported miserable living at Boniato prison in the eastern city of Santiago, the situation seemed better than at many prisons elsewhere in Latin America, which are notorious for severe overcrowding, rampant violence and unsanitary conditions.
The journal contained no allegations of physical abuse, and Vazquez described his relationship with guards as "respectful."
While Vazquez said he gets three meals a day, he said the food is so bad it is "indescribable."
A photocopy of the diary was given to The Associated Press on Tuesday by his wife, Yolanda Huerga. It was written in longhand with pen on loose pages of blank paper that the family was allowed to give him during visits at the prison.
The independent journalist, who was sentenced to 18 years, said he is allowed to go out in the sunshine once a day.
Vazquez was among 75 activists arrested in March during an island crackdown on dissidents that drew widespread international criticism.
The independent journalists, operators of non-state libraries, opposition party leaders and others were tried in April on charges of working with U.S. officials to undermine Fidel Castro (news - web sites)'s government and received sentences ranging from six to 28 years.
Cuba's justice and foreign ministries did not respond to repeated requests for comment on complaints by families about treatment of the dissidents. Some relatives say medical care in the jails is inadequate and others say their loved ones have been shut away in solitary confinement.
Vazquez's description could not be independently confirmed, because foreign reporters and human rights groups do not have access to prisons on the communist-run island.
"It's authentic," said activist Elizardo Sanchez, who served four years in the same prison in the 1980s for disseminating "enemy propaganda."
He said Boniato "was always like that: flies in the day, mosquitoes at night - really bad conditions."
"Throughout Latin America there are many problems in the prisons," Sanchez conceded. "The difference with Cuba is that it will not allow the International Red Cross to visit the prisoners."
Cuba last allowed the Red Cross into its prisons in 1988. Under the organization's policy, the Red Cross later delivered a confidential report to Castro's government.
Sanchez's unofficial group, the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, says the government's latest crackdown raised the number of imprisoned dissidents to more than 300.
Huerga declined to discuss how the journal was smuggled out of the prison last weekend after a regular family visit. She said her husband gave permission to give AP a photocopy of the diary, whose sporadic entries begin in late April with his arrest and end on May 23.
"If for the simple act of practicing journalism they condemned me to 18 years without freedom, then nothing else can be unjust or extreme," Vazquez wrote in one entry.
The U.S. State Department earlier this week expressed concerns about several imprisoned dissidents, including independent economics writer Oscar Espinosa Chepe, who reportedly suffers from liver disease.
Espinosa Chepe's wife wants her 62-year-old husband transferred from a prison hospital in the countryside to a better facility in Havana.
Appeals of the sentences began this week, but the prisoners' relatives said they didn't expect any of the long terms to be shortened.
Gisela Delgado, wife of opposition activist Hector Palacios, said she was emotionally prepared for the possible confirmation of her husband's 25-year sentence.
"I am not optimistic," she said after appearing at the Superior Tribunal, Cuba's court of last resort. "It's all up to the government."
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