Former Cuban prisons chief accused of abusing dissidents now living in South Florida

Posted on Friday, 10.26.12

Former Cuban prisons chief accused of abusing dissidents now living in
South Florida

Dissidents say the former prisons chief denied them needed medical care,
yanked out intravenous needles
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com

A former chief of prisons in Cuba's Villa Clara province is reported to
be living in South Florida despite allegations that he denied medical
treatment to one inmate and ripped out the intravenous feeding tubes of
another on a hunger strike.

Marino Rivera, about 80 years old, and his wife, a former migration
official in the provincial capital, Santa Clara, also are reported to
have made more than one trip back to the island, although government
defectors are usually blocked from returning.

Miami immigration lawyers Santiago Alpizar and Wilfredo Allen said they
have contacted U.S. prosecutors to find out how Rivera could have been
allowed into the United States with his background.

Rivera and his wife were both senior officials in the Interior Ministry,
in charge of internal security, prisons and firefighters and members of
the Communist Party. They could not be located to comment for this story.

Santa Clara dissident Guillermo Fariñas, winner of the European
Parliament's Sakharov human rights prize in 2010, said Rivera yanked two
intravenous needles from his arms in a fit of anger during one of his
many hunger strikes in 1998.

Fariñas said he was serving a three-year sentence for incitement to
crime when he started the hunger strike and after 35 days wound up at
the Celestino Hernandez Hospital in Santa Clara, with intravenous
feeding tubes on each arm.

"I was in a bed in the penal wing and he came in, as the head of jails
and prisons, to talk to me in a good way about stopping the hunger
strike," Fariñas told El Nuevo Herald by phone from his home Thursday.

"But then we argued and he exploded, he went into a rage. He tore out
the two needles with one yank of the tubes. He just yanked them out,"
Fariñas said. "He yelled that opposition people did not need intravenous
tubes. That they needed to be killed."

Aides to Rivera pulled him away, Fariñas added, "but that showed the
criminal essence of this repressor."

Benito Ortega, a dissident who said he spent 22 years in Castro's
prisons and now lives in Virginia, said that Rivera was provincial
prison chief in 1994 when he requested medical treatment for a badly
infected anal fistula.

"He told me that dissidents wanted to be jailed so they could receive
better medical treatment, and that he wasn't going to approve that,"
Ortega told El Nuevo Herald. The fistula eventually cleared up by itself

And Rafael Pérez, a dissident now living in Houston, said he was
harassed by Rivera and his wife many times when he lived across the
street from the couple in Santa Clara. The wife was a lieutenant colonel
in the Interior Ministry, he added.

Rivera burst into his home several times and told him that he would be
arrested if he stepped outside his house, Perez added. The couple also
participated in several "acts of repudiation" against him and other
dissidents in Santa Clara, he said.

Rivera retired as an Interior Ministry colonel about seven years ago,
said Fariñas. The couple made about three trips to a U.S. daughter in
South Florida after the retirement, and decided to stay on their fourth
visit.

All Cubans can stay once they set foot on U.S. territory, but they are
required to declare whether they held top posts in the government or
were members of the ruling Communist party, and can be expelled if they lie.

The three dissidents said they remember Rivera as a particularly
aggressive and often nasty official of the communist government.

Fariñas, who served in the Interior Ministry's elite special forces
until he broke with the government in the 1980s, said he first met
Rivera when he worked in the feared state security department in the
1960s and 1970s. He does not know Rivera's job there, he added, but
Rivera did well enough for the government to reward him with a red Lada
station wagon, a symbol of high status in Cuba.

Rivera was promoted in the early 1980s to director of reeducation for
juvenile prisons in Villa Clara province, where Fariñas ran into him
again. Fariñas said he wrote his psychology doctoral thesis on the
abuses in that very system, such as officials demanding sex or money
from the mothers of the inmates.

Rivera summoned him to his office "pulled his pistol on me and
threatened to put a bullet in me if I did not change the results of my
thesis," Fariñas said. The thesis was later seized by the government and
it was never published.

Ortega said he met Rivera in 1994, when he was already head of prisons
in a province at the time notorious for abuses of inmates. Three inmates
who suffered from asthma died from lack of care at the Alambradas de
Manacas prison, he said.

Perez, the former neighbor, told El Nuevo Herald that he heard Rivera
and his wife has returned to Santa Clara a few months ago and were not
well received by their other neighbors.

"The communists did not receive them well" because of their move to the
United States, Perez said. "And those who oppose the Castros even less."

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/26/3067647/former-cuban-prisons-chief-accused.html