hunger”

Brusnelvis Cabrera Gutiérrez, 23, has been transferred to the most rigorous prison El Pitirre, also called 15-80, in the municipality of San Miguel del Padrón in Havana. The prison change occurs several days after the young man, convicted of participating in the protests on July 11 and 12, 2021, refused to eat food and put on his uniform in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana.

The mother, Migdalia Gutiérrez Padrón, tells 14 intervene that his son has already eaten again but maintains his protest for what he considers an unfair sentence and treatment, as the young man explained to him in a brief telephone call. “They call that 15-80 prison ‘el secadero’ because everyone there is very skinny, they are very hungry. In all the prisons in Cuba there is 99.9% of hunger, but in that one you suffer 100%,” he added. .

“I don’t expect anything good from the dictatorship. The dictatorship doesn’t give anything good and we don’t want it,” he stresses. “I see that it is a prison with many complications. There is nothing favorable in this transfer.” In the same jail 15-80 there are other protesters from 11J, among them Orlando Carvajal and Elier Padrón. Cabrera Gutiérrez is in company 10 and until next Wednesday his mother will not hear from the young man again.

The political prisoner had planted after learning that he was accused of public disorder for protesting during a visit by his family to the Combinado del Este, where he was serving a 10-year sentence, on June 8. “Although we had put her stepmother on her list, when we came to see her they wouldn’t let her in,” her mother said. “There he was indignant and we began to shout ‘Down with Díaz-Canel’, ‘Cuba is a dictatorship’ and ‘Homeland and life’.”

“What came up from us was a lot, an army,” said the woman, who had to leave jail without concluding the family visit.

Security guards pounced on them. “What came up from us was a lot, an army,” said the woman, who had to leave jail without concluding her family visit. At the beginning of this month, her son told him by telephone that she had visited him “an instructor from the Guanabacoa Police to inform him that due to that protest she has a complaint for public disorder.”

Gutiérrez Padrón has asked other mothers of prisoners who know the prison for references about the transfer, since he does not see “a positive side to this change.” And he declares: “The political prisoner is a political prisoner wherever he is. The place is made up of barracks with fiber cement roofs and my son says that he is very hungry and very hot. Right now there is an outbreak of tuberculosis in that place.”

When the instructor informed him of the new accusation, Cabrera Gutiérrez “refused to sign the police record” and pleaded planted. The young man refused to eat food on August 2 and to put on the regulation uniform. The struggle with the prison authorities could have catalyzed his transfer to 15-80 which, although smaller than the Combinado del Este, is considered to be of maximum severity.

The concept of prisoner planted It began to be used in Cuba from 1959, when the first political prisoners were sentenced after Fidel Castro came to power. Many of those inmates refused to accept prison rehabilitation plans, to put on the uniform and to perform certain forced labor. This position also includes, in some cases, renouncing phone calls and family visits. Frequently, the planted They are taken to punishment cells.

Cabrera Gutiérrez was initially sentenced to 15 years in prison for allegedly demonstrating in the popular protests of 9/11, a participation that both the young man and his family emphatically deny. Last year, his sentence was reduced to 10 years after a cassation trial.

The mother alleges that the evidence against her son is spurious. During the first trial, which occurred in March 2022, the image of a young man on a motorcycle who, with the movement of his arm, summoned the protesters, was enough for the Court to condemn him, despite the fact that the mother has insistently refuted that this was his son: “The boy in the photo has no tattoos on his arm and my son has full tattoos.”

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