From the Prisons of Cuba – A Cry for Help!

The following document, here published in English for the first time, comes from a group of 47 prisoners being held in the political prison, La Cabana, in Cuba. The document is dated December 1969. It was submitted by the prisoners through the League for the Rights of Man and addressed to the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations. If and when this latter body considers this appeal, we shall be glad to report its action.—EDS.

TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS OF THE UNITED NATIONS:

We take this unique opportunity, the only one we have had in all these years, to bring before you and denounce before the world the cruelty and crimes to which we political prisoners of Cuba have been subjected.

On the Isle of Pines, a forsaken place of terror and barbarism, more than 7,000 of us lived, crowded in four compounds with a capacity of 870 men each. The guards made frequent rounds during which they mistreated us physically and verbally. What few possessions we had, they threw out. For the slightest reason we were taken to the punishment wards, small bare cells in which beatings and miserable conditions (water-covered floors, mosquitos, etc.) ruled; there we would stay for an indef...