Francisco Osorio Claro

“Well, let me describe the situation, while leaving Cuba through the Mariel port in 1980, those women who wanted to emigrate, they had to proclaim, that they were leaving the country because they were lesbians. Just like I am telling you. Men had to declare they were gays. Because the Government forced them. As a consequence, the common people on the street, they just stopped us emigrants in front of the butcher shop and started to throw eggs on us and shouted: ‘Cubans, like owls, you change Cuba for new jeans. Fidel will score, does not matter with what you hit. Ping Pong go away you are just worms.’ I still remember everything.”

“Not long time ago when I started to feel better after my illness, I was in the Caribe district [a neighborhood of the city of Guantanamo] in a recreational area. When I arrived there, without having any suspicion, I was attacked with a machete. Someone just attacked me harshly, I found out later that it was a group called ‘The gang of three’. Unexpected, without any hunch, because I have no enemy among youth in Guantanamo, I have no problem with anybody. I attended to the hospital in Guantanamo, on the 9th street, between eleven and twelve avenues, in the Carlos Manuel district. I sought for a check out at the hospital and, I presented myself at the police station to make my statement, that was after three days of the incident, when I felt better. I declared my accusations. ‘Hey, you should have killed him, he is a counterrevolutionary.’ That is what I heard, in a police office, and some official, the Captain said: ‘No, justice must be done, because this man came here to announce a physical attack and we must insist on the justice.’ And I heard when someone else inside the office replied: ‘No guys, what you should have done is to kill him, he is a counterrevolutionary.’ So, nothing happened with my declaration.”

“Well, that was horrible there [in the Boniato prison in Santiago de Cuba]. The prisoners were fighting gang against gang, stabbing each other, the police did not enter, they just announced through the loud-speaker: ‘Attention, attention to the penal population, put the corpses at the door number one’. And later, when the situation calmed little bit, the police entered and transferred injured inmates to the Hospital 15 Sur, because at that time the Agustín Honesto hospital did not exist yet. What we lived there was horrible, they destroyed the youth, all the young boys, there were always two or three dead young ones among all dead prisoners, also because of insufficient nutrition. We had to sleep in the beds with all types of bugs, they bit you, there were cockroaches and no hygiene at all. It was a real savagery how we used to live there at that time.”