Testimony regarding the hunger strike and death of Marcelo Diosdado Amelo Rodríguez given in Nashville, Tennessee, February 2002
My name is Raisa Lora Gaquín, widow the Cuban political prisoner Marcelo Diosdado Amelo Rodriguez, 53 years old, who died in prison, in Cuba on May 20, 2001. I am 34 years old and I have my three children with me: Franklin, age 15; Marcelo, 11; and Marcelo Diosdado, 10.
We had a very difficult situation in Cuba, since my husband belonged to a group that opposed the regime of Fidel Castro. He first was incarcerated for 8 years, accused of “rebellion.” He was let out of prison on June 11th, 2000, but three days later he was arrested again, already very sick with chronic circulatory insufficiency. He died in prison of this condition while serving a second 3-year sentence .
The second sentence given to my husband was totally arbitrary, because he had done nothing except receive in his house a large group of friends and family. While he was serving this second sentence his health deteriorated more and more until he finally expired on May 20th, 2001.
Life was very hard for us in Cuba. My husband was in jail, separated from us, isolated, without communication and always struggling, trying to change the way the regime treated the people. My husband was a prisoner in jail, behind bars and I was also a prisoner, on the streets, but behind the bars that surround everybody in Cuba.
For a long time now, Cuba does not admit to the existence of any “political prisoners” or prisoners of conscience. Castro call those who protest against the system counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the state. My husband only had a 12th grade education, but he was, nevertheless, a very civically educated man. He protested openly any injustices that he saw, he talked, he met with others and discussed their rights as citizens. For this he was accused of “rebellion” and sentenced to 8 years.
When he was a prisoner in Boniato prison in Santiago de Cuba, he and a group of about 56 prisoners, went on a hunger strike demanding that they be designated and treated as political prisoners. They spent 24 days on this hunger strike placed in isolation cells. About 10 men came out of this hunger strike in very critical physical condition, my husband among them. This was the beginning of the illness that would eventually kill him because he was kept in infrahuman conditions in jail and was denied adequate medical attention.
After the hunger strike, my husband was identified as a “highly dangerous” character within the prison population. He talked to other prisoners, raised their consciousness, stirred them to discuss what was right and what was not. He was therefore removed from the general prison population and put inside an isolation cell. He spent 4 years and 4 month of his sentence inside an isolation, punishment cell!
The punishment cells at Boniato were approximately 1 by 1.5 meters in size. They were barren, with a thin mattress to sleep on. The water that he had to drink and cleanse himself was smelly, almost putrid, greenish in color. He was allowed a visit from the family every 3 months, and I saw with my own eyes the conditions in which he was being kept. His health was deteriorating badly.
After my visit of March 23, 1996, I decided to go to Havana and let some journalists and other dissident groups know what was going on with him. While I was away in the capital I got a telephone call from my mother saying that my husband had been given “conditional liberty.” I returned to Santiago right away and indeed found him at home, but quite sick. He could not walk a distance longer than 1/2 city block because he felt numbness and pain his legs.
The conditional liberty that he was given was not requested by him, it was just surprisingly given. It required him to go between the 1st and the 5th day of every month to “sign in” at the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) and to par5ticipate in CDR activities. He told the authorities point blank that he would not do any such thing, and that they could take him back to prison if they wanted, but they, nevertheless left him at home.
As soon as saw him I took him to the doctor. He was diagnosed with neuropathy of the legs and was hospitalized for a whole month. In June of that year, he went to Havana to the US Interests Section to request a visa to leave the country and we started all the other errands necessary to be able to leave.
From June to November of 1996 we were visited 36 times by members of the Security Police. Sometimes we had two or three visits on the same day by different agents. They knew all his movements, asked if he was given instructions to commit sabotage, and otherwise harassed us constantly.
During these months, my husband started an organization that he called the “Gerardo Gonzalez Alvarez, The Brother of the Faith” club. They met in our house and every time more and more people came to the meetings. At one point, during the summer of 1997, there were 150 people who congregated in our house and they had to go to the roof of the building to fit in.
On June 3RD, 1997, at out 2 PM, two officers came to the house, took him to the Second Unit Police Station in Santiago de Cuba and told him that his conditional liberty had been revoked because he was observed to have met with 150 counterrevolutionaries in his house. He did not come back to the house and we did no get any information on his whereabouts for two months. Finally, I learned that he was taken to Boniato prison.
This time, in Boniato, he was allowed to be in the general prison population for about 6 months, but again he got in trouble with the penal authorities because he would rally the prisoners to demand things that they were supposed to have and take some other actions considered “dangerous.” He was put back in an isolation cell.. His health deteriorated even further. For a while he was taken regularly to the hospital and given medical attention, but this stopped suddenly, without reason.
I was alarmed given his poor physical state. On April 28, 1998 I went to see the head of the provincial District Attorney office, presented all his medical records and begged that he be given medical attention. I was given the typical run-around of the communist bureaucracy: I was told that they would “look into it,” to come back in two weeks. When I went back the person I spoke with was not there and I was told that there was no record of my request and no papers regarding his health. I had to start the process all over again, while he kept getting worse and worse.
Given that my husband could hardly stand up, one day he fell in his cell and got an ugly gash in his forehead. This wound became infected due to the unsanitary conditions in his cell.
In early 1999 my husband had a mild heart attack. In August of that same year he went on a hunger strike in spite of his very weak condition. He did it this time in protest for the suspension of his family visitation that should have happened July 26. Since that date is an official Castro holiday, they suspended all visits, but rather than just postponing it for later, they scratched the date and told him that he had to wait the usual three months for the next visiting day.
In this hunger strike he became critically ill. He could not stand up, he suffered excruciating pains in his legs. By that time his case had been made known to international human rights organizations and I was receiving medicine and messages of support from people all over the world.
On June 10, 2000, as suddenly as had been the case in other times, my husband was set free again. Immediately, when news of his release spread, people began coming to our house to wish him well. This was enough to get him arrested again three days later. He was kept in the police station for six days. When he was let go again, he was told not to go anywhere near any tourist area in Santiago de Cuba. Soon thereafter, when he is found near the grounds of Hotel Casa Granda, is stopped, beaten up, arrested and slapped a $500 fine.
The constant harassments, the constant arrests made life was unbearable. He went to Havana to finalize the details of our trip to the US and gets a date of August 17th, 2000 to leave Cuba.
On July 11, 2000 my grandmother died and next day a Security Officer came to see us to ask why were there so many people in the funeral home… people who had nothing to do with my grandmother. Next day a Colonel comes back a waves a bunch of papers in front of our faces. He points to the date of August 17th, 2000, very clearly circled in red. “See this?” he shouts, “you may have been given a date, but you are not leaving Cuba! Because of my balls, I tell you, you will never leave!”
That same day, another officer happened to come with a notification for us to go to the Immigration Office by 9 AM next day (the 13th). What a roller coaster of emotion! Perhaps we would be allowed to leave after all! However, by 6 AM on the day we were supposed to go to the Immigration Office, a Security Officer wakes us up and asks for Marcelo to go with him to the Police Station. He says that there were some protest activities planned for that day (the anniversary of the sinking of the tugboat “13th of March”) and that Marcelo had to tell them what he knew about it.
My husband was arrested, sent to Aguadores Prison and left incommunicado for one month. Our date to leave Cuba came and went and my husband was in jail. In November, he finally went to trial, accused of planning protest activities for the anniversary of sinking of the tugboat. He was sentenced to 3 additional years.
As I saw my husband now on visiting days I got more and more depressed. I peeked through the door when he was coming and saw that he was being carried to the visitation room by two other prisoners, because he could not walk anymore. He was thin, pale, weak. He was no being given any medical attention. Marcelo’s 82 year old mother, myself and my three children declared ourselves in hunger strike until he got medical attention, to no avail. He was finally taken to the hospital for one day and later I went to speak with the doctor. She told me that the conditions of the arteries in his legs was hopeless: they were all clogged. Nothing could be done for him.
In Aguadores Prison on May 19th his pain gets unbearable and he screams in agony. After listening to this for some time and seeing that no help was coming, the other prisoners began banging against the bars and screaming themselves trying to get help for Marcelo. Finally, by 4 AM he was taken to the hospital. The nurse on duty there, whom I did not personally know, but who lived a few blocks away from my house, passed a message to me to come right away. When I got there the Security guard tried to stop me, but the nurse, God bless her, intervened. “There is a human being dying there, not a dog!,” she said to the guards, “and his wife and children are here. They have to say their goodbyes” We were all able to see him and were with him when he died on May 20th, 2002.
His funeral was immense. People from all municipalities of the province were there. People from other provinces far away were there as well. We lived in a dead end block, and I can sincerely say that the entire block was full of people. There were also several hundred Security Police and members of Rapid Response Brigades.
The security forces tried to stop the people to walk to the cemetery. They used their clubs, they beat them, they arrested people and took them away, they pushed back. It was a scene that lasted for three hours. Finally they won: the immediate family was put in a patrol car and we sped towards the cemetery. They then remained at the door and did not allow anybody else in.
After my husband died, there was nothing to keep us, his family, in Cuba. I had been branded for a long time and could not stay there. I re-started the process of trying to leave Cuba. I arrived in the United States on the 29th of January, 2002, and to Tennessee on the 30th.