Prisons and HIV/AIDS in Cuba

Prisons and HIV/AIDS in Cuba / Ignacio Estrada
Posted on June 10, 2013
By Ignacio Estrada

Havana, Cuba – There are a total of six penitentiaries in Cuban focused
on confining the Cuban prison population affected by HIV/AIDS.

The existence of these prisons responds to the increase in the disease
in Cuban prisons. A propagation that has as its principal routes of
infection self-innoculation and unprotected sexual contact among prisoners.

These prisons are controlled by the National Prison Administration of
the Ministry of the Interior and what the prison population that suffers
from this disease has least is qualified medical care.

The prison population living with HIV/AIDS in Cuba is now more than 458
inmates of both sexes, fewer women, inmates the great majority of whom
are young men. These inmates are serving sentences for common crimes and
two have sentences of more than six months for political crimes. Inmates
who are forgotten and abandoned by the authorities.

They are inmates described by their own jailers as cockroaches in the
hen's beak (bugs which can't even be allowed to demand anything). The
lack of food in these prisons results in malnourished inmates who in
many cases have bone disease. Add to this the terrible medical care, the
lack of medications and the lack of people qualified to determine or
diagnose opportunistic illnesses.

The patients who serve these sentences are steadily stripped of a number
of violations not only of the Human Rights recognized by the United
Nations (UN) but also those recognized by the United Nations
Organization for Fighting AIDS (UNAIDS). Violations that expose the evil
act of a government that treads on such important rights, displaying
them only as flags of the group in power.

Already there are hundreds of sick inmates constantly denouncing the
existing hunger in these prisons, to which we can add the use of
punishment, beatings, confinement in punishment cells, the short hours
of sunshine and if that wasn't enough the increase of self abuse which
are one of the most common methods that threatens the lives of the
prisoners themselves, but also one of the few weapons they have to
denounce what they live through daily.

Lately the TV channels accredited on the Island have toured various
Cuban prisons but the difference from the alternative media is that
there is not telling of the reality lived by those serving sentences on
the island.

The fact of remaining silent about things like this makes us
unforgivably complicit, and fails one of the precepts given by the
Greatest Man of all Time, Jesus Christ.

27 May 2013

http://translatingcuba.com/prisons-and-hivaids-in-cuba-ignacio-estrada/