Good morning. My name is Alberto Aguilera.
I would like to thank you for this opportunity to speak about the clear and factual violation of human rights in Cuba.
I was in Cuba. I didn't kill anybody, I didn't steal anything from anybody, I didn't cause any harm or damage to anyone; however, I was incarcerated with my girlfriend and six friends just because we were expressing our opinion. I am living factual proof of the violation of rights in Cuba. I was in prison for seven years for no reason. I was condemned to ten years in prison. We all were, me and my friends.
What I want to do here is to speak about the true Cuba, the Cuba people don't know. Many people think of Fidel Castro as an angel, as someone good, as someone who has done a lot of good for Cuba, but this is not true. In Cuba, nothing works. Nothing is good.
People speak about education, and they say Fidel brought a lot of education to Cuba. In Cuba, you can become a doctor, but once you become a doctor, what? You start making $9 a month. What can you do with that?
You go to see a doctor. All right, the doctor is a good doctor, but there's no technology; there are no machines. He checks you out, and then he's sweating, he's tired, he has seen so many people in a single day. Then he gives you a prescription for aspirin, but when you go to the pharmacy they have no aspirin. There are some pharmacies that have not had an aspirin for two years. When they have them, you're allowed to have only two—two per person.
I don't have the time here to express everything I would like to say and to tell you everything about this system. I think it's the cruelest system that Cuba has ever faced. It is so cruel and so inhumane.
I could speak about many things. Everything is so horrible. I can speak, for example, about torture. I went to seven different prisons in these five years, even the Camaguey prison, which is the worst prison of all, only because I spoke up, because I expressed my own opinion. I suffered a lot, thinking that this could happen to other people, that no one can express their opinion.
I don't know if you can picture what happened to us. There is no justice there. We were young people. There were eight of us. We were just talking, talking about what we dreamt for Cuba. We thought we needed more freedom, that we needed democracy. Then we were detained, and we were taken to the high-security jail in Santiago de Cuba, to one of the cells there. We were held there for 75 days, with no attorneys, no legal counsel whatsoever, and without the right to see our family. I was tortured physically, biologically, and psychologically.
When I say “biologically”, I refer to the fact that in the late afternoon there are many mosquitoes, many insects, because there are water drains in the back part of the cells. They allow them to come in, and you start being bitten by these mosquitoes. It is real torture. We had very thin sheets, and we tried to protect ourselves with our fingers, covering our faces, trying to cover all our bodies. But it was so terrible. It was real torture, all night like this. You try to fall asleep, and once you have fallen asleep, they come back again, and then you cannot sleep all night. In the morning, they wake you up and say they're taking you to a shower.
You come to what they call “instruction”, and what is that? That's psychological torture. They told me, for example, that my mother had fallen. She fell and broke a rib, so they said she would not be taken care of unless I changed my mind, unless I would say what they wanted me to say. Maybe my brothers and sisters would also suffer because I wouldn't change my mind and because of the opinions I expressed.
There were so many things. This involved so many things that I could spend days telling you how horrible it was.
There are too many things, and I just can't help thinking about the Cuban people who are suffering this agony that I lived every day. In Cuba, no one loves Castro, not even people who are by his side. He is the cruelest man that Cuba has ever had. He has no regrets for anybody. He doesn't feel sorry for anything, and he's always intimidating the Cuban people.
He uses even me as part of his intimidation. He says, “See what happened to Alberto Aguilera. See how he was imprisoned. Why? Because he was against our regime, against our thinking.”
They have installed a Russian KGB-style mechanism in Cuba, and they export this to other countries just to preserve communism, not only in part of Africa, as you know, but also in America.
This is where the money goes, the money you were talking about. You were wondering why it never gets to the Cuban people. This is how they spend this money; they export terror. This is how they use the money. They have their houses and their cars and we get nothing.