Cuban political prisoner Virgilio Mantilla Arango sentenced to seven months in prison beginning in December 2020, is sick with COVID-19, and his current health status is unknown. Extra-official information received by human rights activists from Camagüey, Cuba on March 17, 2021 said that Virgilio Mantilla is in serious condition. Officials are keeping him in total isolation, and political police are engaging in other maneuvers preventing activists knowing anything concrete about his true situation.

According to Cuban activist Jiordan Marrero Cruz in a March 18, 2021 article in Diario de Cuba,”Virgilio is imprisoned today because on December 9, 2020 he publicly demonstrated with a white pullover his support for the San Isidro Movement. This resulted in arbitrary arrests with the use of violence by the political police. According to Marrero Cruz, Mantilla Arango’s nonviolent struggle dates back to the year 2000.

The Center for a Free Cuba (CFC) is concerned by the pattern of repression applied to Virgilio Mantilla Arango, and has closely followed his case. On February 18, 2021, Mantilla Arango was transferred to the Kilo 8 Prison, a prison of greater severity that does not correspond to the sentence imposed on him in December. On March 3rd, CFC reported that Mantilla was confined with two common prisoners suspected of having COVID-19. The information was provided by independent journalist Yadisley Rodríguez from Camagüey. On March 7, an inmate from Kilo 8 alerted activist Leticia Ramos Herrería, from Matanzas, that Virgilio had been taken from prison and transferred to the Amalia Simoni hospital sick with COVID, adding that he was also on a hunger strike. On March 13, a Camagüey State Security official identifying himself as “Kevin” took a video to the home of independent journalist Yadisley Rodríguez and two other opposition activists that showed Virgilio eating in the hospital. This caught the attention of activists because the military never gives information of this type unless it is part of a disinformation plan.

CFC staff have seen this method applied on other occasions in the same Kilo 8 prison and the same Amalia Simoni hospital, and the results were the death of political prisoners Orlando Zapata Tamayo in 2010 and Yosvany Aróstegui Armenteros in 2020. This is why we are calling on the international community to support the request of human rights activists to receive truthful information on the health situation of Virgilio Mantilla Arango.

Over the past sixty two years the international community became accustomed to the systemic injustices perpetrated by the Castro dictatorship against prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in Cuba. Between 1959 and 1988 no international organizations were allowed to visit prisons in Cuba. This included the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This was the time of the Plantados. Eusebio Peñalver Mazorra , a former Plantado himself, defined a Plantado “as a person who firmly plants his feet while struggling for freedom and democracy in Cuba.” Eusebio Peñalver opposed the Batista dictatorship, and fought alongside Che Guevara with the rebel army to restore Cuba’s constitutional democracy. “But when Castro hijacked the revolution for himself,” he broke ranks rather than sell his soul “to the same devil that here on earth is Castro and communism.” He took up arms against Castro’s military in the Escambray Mountains, he was captured on October 5, 1960 and spent 28 years in prison, and rejected all efforts by Castro officials to “re-educate” him.

This was at a time that very few, outside of the Cuban exile community, heard the cries of Cuba’s many political prisoners and many said that “nobody listened.”

Jaie Laplante on March 4, 2021 in an OpEd in The Miami Herald, titled “Miami Film Festival presents audience the city and the world — and you don’t have to leave home” gave a brief synopsis of the dramatic film Plantados:

“Lilo Vilaplana’s ‘Plantados‘ recounts the horrors of torture suffered by political prisoners in Castro’s prisons before their escape to Miami. It’s an epic, muscular production, a sweeping cri de coeur across those generations; the very potency and verve of its style feel like one final plea to younger Miamians to never forget the atrocities that Castro inflicted on so many.”

Lamentably, Mr. Laplante’s optimism in using the past tense “on the atrocities that Castro inflicted,” does not reflect the reality that they are ongoing. It is also not surprising because the International Committee of the Red Cross was last able to visit a Cuban prison in 1989.

There was a brief moment between 1988 and 1989 after years of long, hard struggle by Cuba’s human rights defenders that the Castro regime’s human rights record was laid bare before the international community. This was not the fruits of detente, or engagement, but a long hard slog to document and expose Havana’s crimes against humanity.

Independent human rights organizations in Cuba have never been legally recognized by the Castro regime. The Cuban Committee for Human Rights was formally established on January 28, 1976 but did not become fully active until 1983 because State Security arrested everyone after it was founded.

Seven years later, in October 1983, in the Combinado del Este prison, several prisoners of conscience with similar aspirations met. The regime committed a mistake that it did not repeat later when it housed imprisoned human rights defenders together, and the Cuban Committee for Human Rights re-emerged where many political conspiracies usually end. It was a small but talented group: Ricardo Bofill, Gustavo Arcos Bergnes, Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz (who was already in the Boniato prison, but kept in contact with the others through family members), the former director of Pabellón Cuba, Teodoro del Valle, the poet René Díaz Almeyda, the diplomat Edmigio López Castillo and Ariel Hidalgo.

The Cuban Committee for Human Rights was able to document human rights abuses and smuggle these reports out of the prisons and out of Cuba reaching the international community. It was their work combined with the diplomatic pressure of the Reagan Administration, and their Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, former prisoner of conscience, Dr. Armando Valladares that on March 8, 1988 the Cuban government was finally called to account for systematically denying access to Cuba’s prisons. On March 11, 1988 Havana invited the United Nations Human Rights Commission to investigate human rights in Cuba. Over the course of the next year not only the UN Human Rights Commission, but also the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were able to enter Cuba and document the human rights violations in the island.

This was the first and the last time these organizations were allowed into Cuba to visit Castro’s prisons was a year later in 1989. Thanks to these visits images, never before seen emerged. Life Magazine in 1988 published the above photo with the following description: “His bread and water left aside, an inmate in Boniato prison, 460 miles from Havana, prepares to push a hand-drawn chessboard across the hall to his opponent, likewise in solitary confinement.” This was the first time photographs had been published of the notorious cell block. These images are reproduced in the new feature film Plantados.

In 1987 the documentary “Nobody Listened” captured Cuba’s human rights reality combining interviews with former political prisoners, including many Plantados, archival footage of firing squads and other instances of repression. Former prisoners described show trials, extajudicial executions, and cruel and unusual punishment that rose to the level of torture. This is the perfect documentary to see, before going to see the new film Plantados, and provides historical context to the new movie, and is available online and for purchase on Amazon.