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Castro Continues Violating Human Rights
Agustin Blazquez and Jaums Sutton refer to the United Nations
involvement in such documentation as Against All Hope: The Struggle
Goes On, published by Newsmax.com, March 21, 2002. Former U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission Armando
Valladares, who spent 22 years in Castro‚s gulag authored
the powerful 1984 book Against All Hope.
 They
write: - it wasn't until that a group of United Nations ambassadors
was able to visit Cuba for 11 days and documented “137 cases
of torture, 7 disappearances, political assassinations and thousands
of human rights violations.” This trip was summarized in
a 400-page report, which was the longest ever to appear on the
agenda of the United Nations.
This 1988 report included „locking up political prisoners
in refrigerated rooms; blindfolded immersion in pools; intimidation
by dogs; firing squad simulations; beatings; forced labor; confinement
for years in dungeons called gavetas (drawers or punishment cells);
the use of loudspeakers with deafening sounds during hunger strikes;
degradation of prisoners by forced nudity in punishment cells.
“Also withholding water during hunger strikes; forcing
prisoners to present themselves in the nude before their families
(to force them to accept plans for political rehabilitation);
denial of medical assistance for the sick; and forcing those condemned
to die to carry their own coffins and dig their own grave prior
to being shot.”
Jorge Olivera from Havana in an urgent open letter dated February
27, 2006, addressed to the leaders of the U.S., Canada and European
Union says, "Given the notable worsening of repression in
Cuba against everyone who exercises rights consigned by the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, I've decided to write to you asking,
today more than ever, your solidarity and support.
"Actions undertaken by the government in the last few months
have reached such levels that they could be considered state terrorism.
Gangs encouraged by the political police have carried out beatings
and raids, among other forms of attack no less alarming. The worst
of this repressive spiral is the impunity of the events. Real
and potential victims find themselves completely abandoned since
there is no institution in the country to handle their complaints.
"The terror has reached a dimension that keeps the Cuban
family permanently frightened. The defenselessness and the cruelty
of the repressors have taken root in the double moral and the
silence of the majority who fear going to jail or receiving the
stigma of being a counterrevolutionary and immediately being marginalized
and suffering the inherent punishment of a system that tramples
on one without anyone caring."
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