Maritza Lugo

"Life there (in the punishment cell) is unbearable for many more reasons. There was not only me, there were more punishment cells, it's like a pavilion, you hear the prisoners that are there inside, but you never see anyone, just hear... There were many of them who were having attacks, who were screaming... There was a girl whose name I have never been able to erase from my mind... I do not know what happened to her finally, and this happened many years ago... Her name was Solange López. That girl entered the prison there, I was told later, because of prostitution. There are young girls who start selling their body, or whatever else, for money, even though they had studied... So she went to prison, and it got complicated inside the prison because the other prisoners stole her belongings and she defended them… Well, she went to the punishment cell. That girl went completely crazy. To the point where her clothes were taken away from her, because she was constantly trying to kill herself. She was cutting her arms against the bars, they were having her there naked, in her bones, just for case that she defecated all around… She did not comb her hair, she did not bathe, she was completely gone... she was not all right anymore. And it was all day screaming and screaming. The guards were coming, when she was already very upset, they gave her shocks, and they beat her instead of giving her medical attention."

"These punishment cells are hellish places inside the prison. They are places that can only condemn you to ten days, at most I think three months or something like that, because they are unbearable places. It's not easy to leave them. And when a person is taken there several times, there, they end up mad, they attack their own lives and everything, because it is unbearable. The punishment cells are very small, they are about one meter wide, even so there is a bed that is made of concrete with nothing, it is a concrete table, for your physical needs there is a gap that they call Turkish toilet, it is a hole where you can do your needs, right there is the water pipe. To bathe you they put the water on, when they want, a few minutes, you can drink water from there, everything to do there... If there is cold, you have to spend horrible cold, if there is heat, it is a horrible heat."

"Well, Rafael was sentenced to 20 years in prison and I was left alone with my two daughters. In spite of everything that I was going through, everything the government did to me, because not only did they arrest Rafael, but they took away everything we had in the house, the animals that I had… They made us a confiscation. The animals that fed my daughters, the goat that gave milk to my daughters, they took it away from us. They said that it was illegal enrichment, causes that they invented as always."

"In Cuba you live with such a great ignorance of what democracy is, of what freedom is, that nobody imagines... how that people... You can hardly fight because you do not know what to do in that situation. But little by little we were reorganizing, we were fighting peacefully, that in the end, the Government was so enraged that it invented a cause for my husband, the father of my daughters, Rafael Ibarra Roque, and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. They accused him of an alleged crime of sabotage, that he had harmed a military station, well, that was a horrible, horrible thing. The government started to create a campaign that he had raped a girl... Well, horrible things... they did it in a way that no one would support us. So that everyone was afraid of what we were going through and nobody wanted to go through that, because of that situation. Nobody would help us, no one would hide us, no one could support us in any way. In the end, they were looking for Rafael Ibarra, they arrested him and they sentenced him to 20 years."