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Virgilio Mantilla Arango, Political Prisoner of the Week, 9/9/07
Virgilio Mantilla Arango was released from prison July 1, 2008.
The opposition to the Cuban dictatorship is a multi-ethnic affair. The struggle for liberty takes all comers, and colors.
After all, the scourge of the Castro brothers has worsened the lives of all Cubans — white, brown and black. The presence especially of so many blacks in the opposition — and in the Castros' gulag — belies the myth that the revolution made Cuba colorblind.
The reality is, the dictatorship is blind to the needs off all Cubans, except the elite, and those who keep them in power. Its racism is just another way to stay in control.
By one account, 80 percent of the inmates in Cuban prisons are black.
Fewer are braver than Virgilio Mantilla Arango.
Mantilla, who is in his 30s, was one of 10 dissidents arrested in March 2002, after they started a demonstration at a hospital in Ciego de Ávila. They had gone there to visit independent journalist Jesús Álvarez Castillo, who reportedly had been attacked by police earlier in the day.
Mantilla and the others were not brought to trial until March 2004, in the first major prosecution of Cuban dissidents since the "black spring" crackdown a year earlier.
They were all convicted, and Mantilla received the most severe punishment: 7 years in prison — 4 years for participating in the hospital protest, and 3 years for continuing his anti-governmental ways while in pretrial detention. (If the dictatorship holds to form, Mantilla will complete his sentence in March 2009.)
Mantilla has remained resistant ever since.
CubaPP.info reports:
In prison Mantilla Arango was himself physically abused by 8 prison guards for distributing hundreds of hand-written flyers denouncing the government's abuses against its citizens. He was handcuffed and taken to an isolated cell in which they proceeded to beat him.
On another occasion the prison authorities wanted the prisoners to attend a meeting in which they were forced to watch a television program called Tribuna Abierta, which it is designed to indoctrinate them. Mantilla Arango led his fellow political prisoners in protest and began shouting 'Down with Fidel Castro'. Their punishment was solitary confinement.
Mantilla got himself in more trouble recently, after he refused to put on a prison-issued uniform — a common form of protest for prisoners of conscience. Via telephone on Sept. 5, he told human rights activist Juan Carlos González Leiva — one of the other dissidents arrested with Mantilla — that guards had suspended his visits by family members and threatened to place him in a punishment cell.
About the same time CubaNet posted the latest news about Mantilla, a reader sent me a link to the same account.
She also wrote of how the revolution has done no favors for black Cubans:
Virgilio Mantilla has suffered TREMENDOUS beatings in prison — more so because he is black and is supposed to be grateful for what the revolution has done for him as a black man. ... So many black Cuban political prisoners have been victims of such abuses since 1959.
One of the surest indicators of the repressive nature of the Castro regime is the jailing of more than 300 political prisoners. To illustrate that reality, Uncommon Sense each week profiles one prisoner. There also is a Political Prisoner archive on the right sidebar. To suggest a prisoner for a profile, send me an e-mail.
Posted by Marc R. Masferrer on September 09, 2007 at 10:01 AM in Cuba, Cuba - Political Prisoner of the Week | Permalink