14ymedio, Havana, 30 May 2024 — A handwritten letter sent to activist Martha Beatriz Roque by political prisoner Nilo Abrahantes Santiago this Tuesday denounces the precarious living conditions of the inmates of Prison 1580, located in the municipality of San Miguel del Padrón, in Havana. The letter, to which this newspaper had access, insists that many inmates suffer from malnutrition.
This prison’s inmates “are about to suffer from serious illness due to hunger (…). Among them is me, weighing 47 kilograms (101 pounds) and being 1.65 meters (5’4″) tall,” Abrahantes details to the former political prisoner of the Black Spring of 2023.
The political prisoner, arrested for participating in the demonstrations of 11 July 2021 (’11J’), included with the letter the signatures of nine other inmates — incarcerated for different reasons — who signed their names and gave an account of their heights and weights “in their own hand,” to demonstrate the disproportion between their size and their body mass.
This is the case of Yohany Lázaro Ramos Cartaya, 5 feet tall and 86 pounds, and Javiel Cárdenas González, 5’10” and only 110 pounds. They are followed by Rolando Guerra Lombillo, 6’2″ and 128 pounds; Joel Crespo Gutiérrez, 5’4″ and 101 pounds, and Ángel Lázaro Castellano Ramírez, also 5’4″ m 101 pounds. Four others, Liván Díaz Machado, Jonathan Delgado Traba, Bárbaro Oviedo Rosell and Wilber Luis Pérez, stand about 5’7″ tall, but in no case exceed 119 pounds, a body mass index considered low for men of their height.
