Canadian held in 'horrific' Cuban prison being denied consular visits

Yvis Abadin says it was on July 12 — the day after unprecedented anti-government demonstrations exploded across Cuba — that her 19-year-old son Michael Carey Abadin was taken.

There were still scattered acts of protest popping up around their neighbourhood in Old Havana, where police and pro-government vigilantes called Rapid Response Brigades had a heavy presence.

"Michael went down to the street and sat on the sidewalk talking with a friend," Yvis Abadin told CBC News. "Some people from another building about half a block away threw some rocks and broke the windshield of a police car.

"An hour later, some big men in civilian clothes with bats came by and detained Michael.

"There are many witnesses who saw that my son was just sitting there. They're holding my son in prison unjustly."

Michael Carey Abadin, who holds Canadian citizenship and was planning to begin university in Canada, was one of approximately 3,000 people arrested during or after the protests against Cuba's one-party rule.

The more than 500 Cubans imprisoned in connection with the protests are experiencing "horrific" conditions, said Juan Pappier of Human Rights Watch, whose organization has spoken with 130 people arrested on July 11 and 12.

"The cells are overcrowded," he told CBC. "They have very little food. They don't have access to water for many hours. The conditions are so bad that many of them told us that they lost track of time. They didn't know what day it was or what time of day."

A Human Rights Watch report says detainees have been "forced to squat naked, apparently deliberately deprived of sleep, brutally beaten, and held in cells without natural light."

"During these detentions, many of the prisoners are subjected to repeated interrogations where they are forced to confess to crimes they haven't committed, or to identify people who are presumably responsible for organizing the demonstrations," Pappier told CBC.

The report also says prisoners are woken up in the night and ordered to shout political slogans such as "Viva Fidel!" Those who don't are sent to tiny punishment cells.

Yvis Abadin said that on the first day of her son's journey through the Cuban prison system, he was taken to a police barracks called "punto 30" where police officers accused him of being a "gusano" (worm) or counter-revolutionary. He was then taken to a "centre of operations" on Picota Street, she said, and after three weeks was transferred to the Jovenes de Occidente prison in the Havana suburb of El Guatao, where he remains.

That was where he met fellow detainee Rolando Remedios, who was arrested on 11 July. An Agence France-Presse news photograph of Remedios being choked and forced into a police car by a government vigilante was published around the world and became an iconic image of the day.

Remedios, a 25-year-old medical sciences student, said he had been trying to reach the protest on Havana's waterfront boulevard when he was intercepted by police.