FROM CUBA:
"With only a statement from my wife, Maite Consuegra, who they detained and then lied to, by telling her that I wanted to kill her, and whose statement lasted barely a minute, in said statement she asserted that I had forced her to make some counterrevolutionary signs, for such a statement I was sentenced on March 20, 1995 by the Provincial Tribunal in Holguin, to seven years in prison".
Portelles Hernandez, then the president of the Social democrat Party for the province of Holguin, says in his letter that several days after the trial, being totally incommunicated, State Security gave him a copy of the sentence through Mayor Urgellez and Captain Guillermo Lemus, who told him that the Americans better not get involved in Cuba, otherwise he would be the first one to lose his life.
"In every prison where I've been", says the prisoner in his letter, "I have been humiliated and mistreated, to the extent that, in a beating which they subjected me to, at the prison in Holguin, they fractured an arm and a rib, and kept me for 10 days in a punishment cells, completely naked, without a bed and nothing with which to cover myself from the cold, this happened in January of 1995, in the middle of winter.
"The misery and corruption", Portelles Hernandez ends by saying in his letter of denunciation, "those are the fundamental characteristics of Cuban prisons. There's not the least respect for human rights. In everyone of them where I've been you can hear the complaints for the artitrariness being committed by the police and the tribunals".
Rene Portelles Hernandez, since his detention on September 24, 1994, has been kept at the site of the State Security offices for Holguin; later, on two occassions, he was taken to the provincial prison for the same district; later to the prison at Canaleta, Ciego de Avila province; sometime later sent to Ariza prison, in Cienfuegos, and presently he is held at Valle Grande prison, in the city of Havana, where he was transferred to on March 22, 1996.