TOTALITARIAN IMAGES: CUBA'S LARGEST PRISON

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

CUBA'S LARGEST PRISON

Cuba's Population: 11.3 millions.

Worldwide Ranking: Cuba has the fifth largest inmate population in the world with 531 prisoners for every 100,000 inhabitants.

Latin American Ranking: Cuba is ranked as the second nation with the largest inmate population per inhabitants in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Source Consulted:
For statistical information on the number of prisoners per inhabitants in Cuba and worldwide see Roy Walmsley, World Prison Population List, Eighth Edition (King College, London, December, 2009), 1 & 3.

Cuba: The Prison Island
Map of Cuba's Prisons. Legend from top to bottom:
1. Maximum Security Prisons. (Yellow)
2. Minimum Security Prisons. (Red)
3. Correctional/Reform Prisons.(Blue)

COMBINADO DEL ESTE PRISON
Cuba's Largest Prison

Built in 1975.

Hidden Camera inside El Combinado del Este Prison."En las Entrañas del Combinado del Este" by Dalvinder Singh Jagpal (inmate) and Dania Virgen García (independent journalist/reporter).

Aerial view of Combinado del Este

This picture of a prison cell known as "La Gaveta/The Drawer" corresponds to the Prison of Manzanillo, but a similar one exists at Combinado del Este. As a form of torture prison officials confine up to 15 political and non political prisoners for prolonged periods of time. It has been reported that prisoners are kept here for 8-10 months. The small dimensions of the cell force prisoners to lie down all the time. Prisoners have to defecate and urinate in an extremely limited space and cannot stand up as the ceiling is very low.

Punishment cell or 'La Gaveta'

Isolation cells or 'Las Tapiadas/Blocked Cells in Combinado del Este Prison.

Replica of the confinement cell "Solitario" where opposition leader Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet was imprisoned at the Combinado del Este Prison for nearly 8 years. Photo from Dr. Biscet's Blog

This torture is commonly known by prison guards in Cuba as 'La Shakira' A prisoner's hands and feet are tied down to his back. The prisoner is then thrown in a rodent infected cell and left there for 48 hours. The name of this torture uses the name of the Colombian singer as a form of mockery and denigration to the dignity of the prisoner who is forced to move his hips desperately in response to the painful position he is in.

Drawing of Dr. Biscet's cell at Combinado del Este. Photo from Dr. Biscet's Blog

Whereabouts of the Combinado del Este Prison: Kilometro 13 y medio y Carretera Monumental. Ciudad Habana, Cuba

Prison Layout: 3 Buildings known as 1, 2 and 3 with 4 floors (height) each.

Political Prisoners: Political prisoners are confined within a section of 'Building 1'

Demographics: An estimate of 5,000 prisoners (Common and Political Prisoners).

Food: Unfit for human consumption: 30 grams of rice, 5 grams of a mixture from flour and soy ground beef, a watered/insipid pea soup. Every 15 days prisoners receive a small piece of chicken.

Jail Cells: 3 meters in width, 6 meters in length, 2 meters in height. Usually in 1 cell there are 8 prisoners. 3 single-persons bed separated by 50 centimeters from each other.

Hygiene: Absence of the most basic hygiene is prevalent. Cells are infested with roaches, rats and mosquitoes. Roofs sealed with nylon on top to prevent bathroom residues from falling down. Water is scarce and not drinkable. Prison authorities do not provide disinfectants and prohibit prisoners' families from bringing them when they visit.

Overall: Inhuman conditions as it has been reported and denounced by reports from political prisoners.

Sources consulted:
Roy Walmsley, World Prison Population List, Eighth Edition (King College, London, December, 2009)

Reynol Vicente Sanchez, "Open Letter to Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo"

Juan O. Tamayo, "Cuban Inmates Complain of Poor Conditions" El Nuevo Herald (March 14, 2012)

Photos from 'El Combinado del Este Prison' extracted from section 'Carceles de Cuba' in forum Secretos de Cuba and Google Search

Available Online Resources on Combinado del Este Prison:

Dugald McConnell and Brian Todd, "Cuban Prisoners said to Make Videos Exposing Prison Conditions" CNN (March 16, 2012)
CBS4, Inside Cuba's Prison Walls (March 16, 2012)Reynol
Oscar Elias Biscet, To the New York Academy of Sciences (September 11, 2008). At the time Dr. Biscet wrote this letter he was confined to cell 1232, Building 1, Hall 2S at Combinado del Este Prison where he was imprisoned for 8 years.
Vicente Sanchez, "Open Letter to Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo"

Iván Garcia, El Combinado del Este Prison

Yamil Dominguez, Combinado del Este

Yoanis Sanchez, "A Visit to Cuba's Largest Prison" The Huffington Post (June 27, 2011)
Hiram Abí Cobas Nuñez, Combinado del Este: Una Carcel Pequeña Tras Otra Grande (Of Human Rights, 1991)

Mireya Robles, Combinado del Este: Me Reflejo en la Callada Respiración de la Yerba (2010)

Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, Inter-American Yearbook on Human Rights, 1988

Armando Valladares, Against All Hopes: the Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares (Ballantine Books, 1987)

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Charles G. Taylor

He started Liberia's civil war as a warlord in 1989. Elected president of Liberia in 1997. He ruled 6 years before being forced into exile in Nigeria. In August, 2003 with rebels already in the capital Taylor agreed to a deal to go to Calabar in southern Nigeria to end the conflict. In 2 separate sentences (in April and then in May 30, 2012) Taylor was convicted by an international court in the Hague of 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity over his role in the brutal civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone, where he was accused of backing rebels responsible for widespread atrocities. On May 30, 2012 Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison after his April conviction for trafficking guns to rebels in Sierra Leone in exchange for so-called blood diamonds. This ruling is historic as it makes Taylor the first head of state to face imprisonment from an international war-crimes court since the Nuremberg trials that closed World War II. In sentencing Mr. Taylor, Judge Richard Lussik alluded to the atrocities Sierra Leone rebels committed with the weaponry he supplied while president.

TOTALITARIAN TRENDS ON THE HEADLINES

July 7, 2012:

The Telegraph: Former Argentine dictators found guilty of baby theft.

May 21: 2012:

Human Rights Watch: Angola: Stop Rape, Abuse of Congolese Migrants.

Amnesty International: Mexico: Freedom of expression still under attack as six journalists killed

May 12, 2012:

EFE/NTN24: The Castro regime launched a new wave of pogroms and repudiation acts against the 'Ladies in White,' a humanitarian group of Cuban women who protest for the release of all political prisoners in the island and for an end to the repressive framework and laws that put Cubans behind bars for their political ideas.

EFE/NTN24: Peruvian Police rescued over 1,108 women victims of human trafficking.

May 9, 2012:

EFE/NTN24: A 14-year old Moroccan girl is forced by justice to marry her rapist. In Morocco, a retrograde Penal Code allows a rapist to marry his victim and avoid prison sentence.

May 7, 2012:

The Guardian: Terrorist group FARC conditions the release of kidnapped French journalist Romeo Langlois.

May 3, 2012:

Anmesty International: Azeri Blogger Emin Milli criticizes Aerbaijan's president (Ilham Heydar) and the official policy of "Tolerable Authoritarianism"

Amnesty International: Government Tactics to Silence Journalists in Sudan

NYTimes: Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng leaves US Embassy amid threats of Chinese government officials to beat wife to death.

May 2, 2012:

NTN24: Colombian Army confirmed FARC's kidnapping of French journalist Romeo Langlois.

HRW Report: Escalation of Political Violence in Burundi.

May 1, 2012:

Amnesty International: World Press Freedom Day: Repression in the Digital Age.

April 30, 2012:

Diario de Cuba: Tomás Borge Martínez, founder of the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN) in Nicaragua died at 81. As Minister of the Interior during the Sandinista regime in the 1980s Borges was accused of massacring 37 political prisoners in June of 1980. He was in charge of the repressive machinery against the so called "enemies" of the revolution that included Catholic priests and journalists.

April 26, 2012:

Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia convicted for crimes against humanity.

Amnesty International: Cambodian environmental activist shot dead

April 25, 2012:

Misceláneas de Cuba: The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation publishes a partial list of Cubans arrested and charged for political reasons.

José Daniel Ferrer told his wife "they are killing me slowly." The Cuban dissident and accused Castro regime of mixing toxic substance in his food and water.

April 24, 2012:

Cuban dissident José Daniel Ferrer Garcia, leader of the the opposition group 'Unión Patriotica de Cuba' started a hunger strike this Monday to protest the illegality of his arrest. Ferrer has been arrested for 3 weeks without formal charges. In the past, Ferrer was imprisoned as part of the massive crackdown on dissidents ordered by the Castro regime in 2003 - in the event known as the 'Dark Spring' or 'Primavera Negra'. On that occasion he was imprisoned for 8 years.

The Interamerican Press Society publishes a report on freedom of expression in Latin America.

Chile plans to open General Augusto Pinochet’s testament to determine the true fortune of the former dictator.

Paramilitary group in Haiti refuses to disband.

April 21, 2012:

Kazakhstan: Journalist Stabbed in Violent Attack

March 26, 2012:

Afghanistan: Hundreds of Girls Jailed for so called Moral Crimes

MAY IN HISTORY

May 21, 1988: Mikhail Gorbachev consolidates power in the Soviet Union.

May 18, 1989: One million protesters take on the streets of Beijing calling for democratic reform of the political system in China and initiating the movement known as 'Tianamen Square Rebellion' The Chinese regime responded to the rebellion witth force by killing thousands and arresting 10,000 people

May 15, 1988: After more than 8 years of a violent intervention and involved in a war that drained its economy economy, the Soviet Union begins the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

May 14, 1955: The Warsaw Pact is formed between the Soviet Union and 7 of its European satellite states (Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria). Under the terms of this treaty the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 when both countries decided to deviate from the soviet system.

May 11, 1988: Kim Philby, an M.I.6. Intelligence Officer and double agent for the Soviet Union dies at age 76 in Moscow. Philby was the most damaging spy of his generation in the service of the Soviets.

May 10, 1990: In attempt to dispel the public opinion about the brutal massacre during the 1989 protests, the Chinese regime announced the release of 211 people arrested during the protests held in Tianamen Square.

May 9, 1955: West Germany Joins NATO

May 7, 1960: Hard-liner Leonid Brezhnev Selected as Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet

May 6, 1992: Gorbachev's Speech Marked the Symbolic Conclusion of the Cold War. The speech given this day by the former soviet leader at Westminister College, Missouri - the site of Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech 46 years before marks the symbolic end of the Cold war.

May 4, 1980: Josip Broz Tito, communist ruler of Yugoslavia since 1945 dies.

May 2, 1957: Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) known for his anti communist stances dies.

April 30, 1945: Adolf Hitler commits suicide. A reminder to present day dictators about the fate that awaits those who oppress and destroy.

April 28, 1945: On this day, Il Duce, Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are shot by Italian partisans

April 25, 1983: In a propagandist effort to influence soviet perceptions among young people in the United States, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov writes a letter to Samantha Smith, an American fifth grader in an attempt to refute Ronald Reagan's attacks on the 'The Evil Empire.'

March/April, 2003. 'Primavera Negra' or 'Dark Spring in Cuba'. In response to the threat posed by the Varela Project proposed by the Christian Movement Liberation to reform the constitution and allow free elections and anxious of the growing influence of Cuban dissidents through the island the Castro regime ordered a massive arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of independent journalists, human rights activists and dissidents across Cuba.

April 27, 1978. Afghan president Sardar Mohammed Daoud is overthrown and murdered in a coup led by procommunist rebels. The coup led to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Source: Extracted from the section titled: "This Day in History: The Cold War" from The History Channel

ON TOTALITARIANISM

1- The term 'totalitarianism' was first used scholarly by political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt in 1951 in her famous book 'On Totalitarianism.'

2- When refering to 'totalitarianism' Arendt points to Nazi Germany and Soviet Stalinism.

3-Arendt insisted that these manifestations of political evil could not be understood as mere extensions in scale or scope of already existing precedents, but rather that they represented a completely 'novel form of government', one built upon terror and ideological fiction.

4- Where older tyrannies had used terror as an instrument for attaining or sustaining power, modern totalitarian regimes exhibited little strategic rationality in their use of terror. Rather, terror was no longer a means to a political end, but an end in itself.

5- The necessity of terror in totalitarian regimes was now justified by recourse to supposed laws of history (such as the inevitable triumph of the classless society) or nature (such as the inevitability of a war between 'chosen' and other 'degenerate' races).

6- For Arendt, the popular appeal of totalitarian ideologies with their capacity to mobilize populations to do their bidding, rested upon the devastation of ordered and stable contexts in which people once lived. The impact of the First World War, and the Great Depression, and the spread of revolutionary unrest, left people open to the promulgation of a single, clear and unambiguous idea that would allocate responsibility for woes, and indicate a clear path that would secure the future against insecurity and danger.

7-Totalitarian ideologies offered just such answers, purporting discovered a 'key to history' with which events of the past and present could be explained, and the future secured by doing history's or nature's bidding. Accordingly the amenability of European populations to totalitarian ideas was the consequence of a series of pathologies that had eroded the public or political realm as a space of liberty and freedom.

8-These pathologies included the expansionism of imperialist capital with its administrative management of colonial suppression, and the usurpation of the state by the bourgeoisie as an instrument by which to further its own sectional interests. This in turn led to the delegitimation of political institutions, and the atrophy of the principles of citizenship and deliberative consensus that had been the heart of the democratic political enterprise. The rise of totalitarianism was thus to be understood in light of the accumulation of pathologies that had undermined the conditions of possibility for a viable public life that could unite citizens, while simultaneously preserving their liberty and uniqueness (a condition that Arendt referred to as 'plurality').

Sources:

Hannah Arendt, On Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt, The Internet Encyclopedia of Political Philosophy

WHAT IS THIS BLOG ABOUT?

TOTALITARIAN IMAGES

is a Blog intended for educational purposes. The aim is to approach totalitarianism from visual sources, photos, caricatures, posters, and all graphical information available as a starting point to inform about totalitarian systems across the globe. Beyond Hannah Arendt's definition of totalitarianism, this site broadens the concept to include all visual materials from authoritarian and dictatorial states in Latin America and the Caribbean to totalitarian systems in Europe, Asia and Africa. The overall purpose is to preserve the historical memory about the totalitarian experience and its impact on individual lives.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

CUBA'S LARGEST PRISON

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