CONTINUE
"They want to end his life," denounces Amelia García Vega, mother of opponent José Daniel Ferrer, on the other end of the phone, in conversation with ABC, from Florida. “He is killing him with hunger, with torture… They are doing him a lot of harm because he is harming them.” García Vega refers to the Cuban regime that challenges the dissident of July 11 because he is willing to participate in historic protests that extend for decades in Cuban cities, and that has been denied in hundreds of convictions against peaceful protesters. Since then he has known his son in prison, after reactivating a suspended sentence, after the intermediation of international organizations.
During this last year, both Ferrer's family and the NGO Prisoners Defenders have denounced the conditions in which the opponent lives: confined to a punishment cell, in total isolation, without windows or exposed ventilation, high temperatures and disorientation.
“Access to the outside world and human contact are prevented. The cell is illuminated 24 hours a day by a powerful artificial light that also affects the difficulty of falling asleep; the food they receive is in a state of decomposition…”.
MISSING @jdanielferrer 17 days ago
His family, worried
They're serious. They have been killing him with #torture of all kinds
Where are the democrats who fill their mouths on their continent but remain silent for others? @eu_eeas has a conscience➡️Speak now!#11JCuba#Cubahttps://t.co/RyLAKO91wspic.twitter.com/JZrSS8ld9p
– Prisoners Defenders (@CubanDefenders) June 21, 2022
Ferrer's wife, Nelva Ismarays Ortega, has repeatedly denounced the impossibility of seeing or speaking on the phone with her husband, for which she has asked for a life certificate to know his physical condition. According to him from the Mar Verde military prison, where she meets Ferrer, he would not want to talk to his family. His wife, in statements to the independent media outlet 'CiberCuba', has pointed out that this is an excuse that the regime has already changed previously to mask a strike by the dissident's chamber.
That Friday, the wife returned to Mar Verde, accompanied by her three-year-old son, to demand, once again, “life certificate from his father. After making me wait for more than four hours, they took me to the office of the head of the prison, Lieutenant Colonel Pineda,” explained Nelva Ismarays in a recording provided this morning to this newspaper by the opponent's sister, Ana Belkis Ferrer. “This one tried to convince me again, with the same string of lies as the previous time. Faced with my position and my husband's demand for proof of life, then I was left there guarded by an officer for more than an hour. Then he appeared with the repressive agent who calls himself José to show me a video, supposedly of my husband, "says Ferrer's wife in her recording, who emphasizes that she does not intend to talk about said video because "it is totally a joke." She insists and she also asked: “It's incredible that they don't let me see my husband, listen to him through a phone call; that there are no conjugal or family visits… Supposedly because of the position my husband has taken.”
Nelva Ismarays Ortega
José Daniel Ferrer, a prisoner of conscience of the Group of 75, is almost the only one who did not want to leave the island as they did among those detained during the Black Spring of 2003. After serving eight years in prison out of the 25 he had been sentenced, Ferrer, coordinator of the Patriotic Union of Cuba and president for a few months of the Council for Democratic Transition in Cuba, was released and has continued to denounce the violation of rights by the Cuban regime. This led to being imprisoned for crimes committed by State Security for six months. He was released after pressure from the international community. Since then, in 2020, until his arrest in July 2021, they were kept under house arrest, where he and his family were constantly harassed (his son 'Danielito' was also arrested on several occasions). For years, the Cuban regime has tried to get Ferrer to leave the island, as he has done with many other dissidents, offering exile by jail, but he has never accepted. Those who do not accept, like him, are sentenced to serve several years in prison, to silence them, to the point of not letting them communicate. This has also been the case of Luis Manuel Otero and Maykel Castillo 'el Osorbo', sentenced to 5 and 9 years in prison for not wanting to leave Cuba, despite being sick.
One year of violation of rights
In the video that shows Nelva, "my husband is seen as if he were on television," she continues. “For a year there have been constant and permanent violations of his rights and freedoms. And now they plan to solve everything with a video? », She questions her. “They think that we are going to accept a video as faith of life, and no. Only my husband's own words through 20 minutes of regulatory calls, calls that many times he has been denied, even if it is ten minutes, only he can confirm what is happening. Undoubtedly all this is a macabre game of the dictatorship -denounce-, which is not only psychologically torturing my husband but also the whole family. And we are not going to accept this, which is why we are going to continue reporting him as missing,” concluded Nelva Ismarays.
