Cuban political prisoner Ernesto Borges Pérez was released this Thursday After 27 years in prison. In telephone conversation with ABC, the one known as “The Prisoner of Castro” and one of the Cuban political prisoners who had been in prison for the most years, declared that he was « … Very happy »with his family.
«I’m going to take a few days to be with my father, my brother and the rest of the family. This is a very special moment after so many separate years and suffering. Then I will try to make the official identity documents (card and passport) because I want to try to leave Cuba as soon as possible. Even if you are out of prison, Cuba is not a safe country for me”He said in relation to state security threats.
Borges also explained that he needs to review his state of health because he suffers from cataracts several years ago and has an inguinal hernia, conditions that require surgical processes to which he fears to submit in Cuba due to the risk for his life.
Likewise, he wanted to meet with his daughter in the United States, which was barely four years old when his father was already imprisoned who has not been able to embrace in decades.
Death condemned
With just 32 years Age, Ernesto Borges was arrested in 1998 when he was a young captain of the Directorate of Contrainteligence of the Ministry of Interior (Minint). In statements to the press, he acknowledged that he was preparing to deliver to officials of the then Office of Interests of the United States in Havana a list of 26 Cuban spies that the security of the State would enter American territory and several NATO countries. He was accused of tentative espionage; First he was sentenced to death penalty, but he was then switched for 30 years of deprivation of liberty.
According to them Cuban military lawshe had to serve only one third of the conviction (10 years). In 2012, when he had been imprisoned for 14 years, and before the refusal of the regime to release him, he began a hunger strike that he only left when Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino told him that he would intercede for him before Raúl Castro. However, Castro’s response was that former prisoners were a case of him.
With 59 years of age, Ernesto Borges has remained almost half of his life in prison, subject to physical and psychological torture. During the first 10 years of imprisonment, he was in semi -cure cells, semi -applying and with little ventilation.
In 2020, when his mother, Santa Ivonne Pérez, died, Borges was taken to the funeral home by several state security officers, handcuffed with hands and feet, as if it were an extremely dangerous prisoner.
Shortly after his mother’s death, he was transferred to a minor severity regime in the prison known as the east combined, in Havana. Then, he received the first prison pass to visit his family, although under the threat that, if he gave statements to the press, he would be sent again to a system of greater severity, which would mean taking away his family’s visits. In July 2021, as punishment for denouncing an outbreak of COVID-19 in prison, the prison authorities returned to place it in a regime of greater severity.
On July 17, Borges would turn 27 years of imprisonment.
«They enforced me until the last day, but I’m already free. I thank all those who have supported me throughout these difficult years, ”he concluded.
