Cuban dissident Jose Daniel Ferrer, left, sits with Cuban LGBT activist Juana Mora Cedeno, center, and Cuban political activist Antonio Rodiles, right, during a meeting with President Barack Obama at the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba, March 22, 2016. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
(Tribune News Service) — Just hours after his release from prison on Thursday, Cuban opposition leader José Daniel Ferrer called on the incoming Trump administration to make no concessions to the Havana regime but at the same time help alleviate the humanitarian crisis on the island.
After four-and-a-half years, Ferrer was released thanks to a deal brokered between the Biden administration, the Vatican and the Cuban government to release political prisoners.
Ferrer, the leader of the dissident organization Unión Patriótica de Cuba, was one of the most prominent political prisoners the Cuban government had been holding as bargaining chips.
Just hours after his release from the Mal Verde prison in Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city on the island, Ferrer spoke with the Miami Herald about the deal, the abuses he suffered in prison and the future of the country.
“To the extent that we must condemn the dictatorship... we must look for mechanisms that can help alleviate hunger,” he said about what he expected from the new U.S. government due to take office on Monday.
He also called on Cuban exiles not to stop supporting the fight for democracy in Cuba.
The conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Q: How do you feel and what do you think about your release?
I feel pretty good despite having spent years in truly terrible conditions, in an extreme situation, having been beaten, with illnesses and isolation for three years and four months. Total isolation.
I am fired up with the spirit to continue fighting, to continue giving my humble but firm and determined contribution to the cause for freedom, democracy, respect for human rights and the end of hunger, misery, and extreme poverty into which tyranny has plunged our country.
They wanted to impose conditions on me. They say that I am on parole, which I do not accept. They did not give me any documents because I did not sign the conditions that they were imposing on me, such as that I have to be supervised by a court and that I have to abide by the socialist order. In good Spanish, that means that the wolves took over Cuba more than 60 years ago, and they want the rest of the Cubans to be submissive sheep. And since I refuse to be a submissive sheep and I rebel against the wolves, they threatened me that I could go back to prison.
I told them verbatim, ‘Well, don’t release me. Leave me locked up because I am not going to let any kind of measure or conditions be imposed on me, and I am going to continue fighting for freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights.’
They threw me out of there. They said they did not want to discuss ideological issues with me. They told me, ‘Your wife and son are outside. Go with them. Go home.’
Q:What do you think about the agreement between the Vatican and the Biden administration?
I am very ashamed of the attitude of the Biden administration and the Vatican. Once again, they allow themselves to be used by the tyranny.
Anyone who has read the two statements from the Foreign Ministry of the tyranny, the one that talks about the three measures that Biden suspended and the one that talks about the 553 prisoners who were to be released, comes to the conclusion that they are two things that, although they came out on the same day, are independent of each other. They are spreading through all their media outlets.... that the United States had to give in to the overwhelming solidarity with the Cuban regime of many inside and outside the United States, in Latin America and the world. That the United States had to remove these measures, and it will also be obligated to remove other embargo measures because they are unjust, cruel, inhuman, etc.
On the other hand, they present the prisoners releases – under conditions and threats as in my case a few hours ago – as quote-unquote gestures of goodwill, a humanitarian gesture towards Pope Francis. We all know that giving oxygen to the tyranny— which is not only rapidly destroying the Cuban nation and criminally oppressing the Cuban people but is also complicit in what is happening in Venezuela, in Nicaragua, publicly supports Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, openly sympathizes with Hezbollah, with Hamas, with the Iranian regime, with North Korea — should not have happened.
And the Pope and the Vatican must remember that this is not happening for the first time. Prisoners have been released, in 2010, 2014, and then they imprison thousands again because the intention of the tyranny is to keep the people not only oppressed, but terrorized all the time. Therefore, allowing them to play with this triumphalist and lying language is letting them do whatever they want.
The Vatican and Biden are facing a Pablo Escobar-style bully, as if they were scared schoolchildren who let him tell his story, his false, fraudulent speech, without it having the slightest consequence. This is sad because they now want not only applause because they are going to release 553, which does not even come close, I believe, to half of the total number of political prisoners who suffer in extreme conditions and who are about to die at any moment. They don’t just want applause, they want the United States to continue to lift measures.
Q: Did they tell you that you had to leave the country?
No, they didn’t mention it. On Nov. 18 they beat me brutally and took me to a hospital in the Boniato prison, a place that they euphemistically call a hospital, which is a center where men die from tuberculosis, other infections and malnutrition. That day, after they beat me, they told me again that my only option was to leave the country because otherwise it would not known when I would be released. And they told me that on several occasions. They told me that during the first months of my imprisonment, under the worst conditions I have ever suffered in my entire history in the regime’s prisons. They repeated that to me more than eight or ten times during all this time.
Q: Why did they beat you?
Because I refused to be taken to the hospital. A week before the 18th, they told me they would send me to the Boniato Hospital for a medical check-up. And I told them that I was not going to the hospital because I have information that there is scabies there, that there are prisoners who are dying of malnutrition, tuberculosis and other infections. And I am not going to a place where you want to infect me with God knows how many diseases.
Seven days later they showed up in the morning and told me that I had to go with them to the Boniato prison, to the hospital. I refused and stayed sitting on the floor. And immediately six members of an Interior Ministry brigade called the Driving Brigade — because they drive the prisoners from one place to another — started beating me, punching me on an arm that it was previously injured. They caused a wound on that arm with something sharp that bled for two days. I still have the scar there from the jabs. They hit me on the head, on the back, they twisted my arms behind my back and handcuffed me. They tightened the handcuffs and put pressure on my injured arm and on my healthy arm with my hands at the height of my head in a method they mockingly call ‘the bicycle’ to force you to run, because if you don’t run, the pressure you feel is like they are breaking your arms. That’s how they took me out by hitting me, pushing me, with that kind of torture. And they did it in Valverde and they repeated it in Boniato, when I refused to get out of the jail wagon. There they started again, violently, to get me to go inside the hospital.
When I entered I confirmed what I already knew: The number of prisoners who had died in the last 10 months was around 20, and there were several prisoners with scabies, malnourished, who looked like inmates in a concentration camp. And the abuse, the terrible food. I was there without eating or drinking water most of the time to avoid any contagion.
From there they moved me back to Mal Verde. When I arrived at Mal Verde they took me out of the isolation where I had been for three years and four months and put me in a cell with other common prisoners and with a plague of flies and bedbugs. Terrible. At night you couldn’t sleep because of the bedbugs or during the day because of the flies.
Q: When you were isolated, were you alone in a walled cell?
When I entered the cell, it was entirely walled up. But because of my protest, they made a window, I think, after 70 or 80 days, if my memory serves me right. Then, I had a view of the prison yard, and in the distance, I saw trees.
My isolation for three years and four months was so total that no prisoner could get close to me. The person who cleaned the corridor leading to the door of my cell could not speak to me because the door was walled up. The person who brought me water had to put it down near the cell, leave, and then they would open the door to bring in the water so that I could not be seen. No one could talk to me. The guards were forbidden to speak to me. I was the one who gradually imposed that they at least listen to my political jokes.
I spent six months without a television and 14 months without a pencil and paper because they said I couldn’t write. I spent almost two years without a telephone. I had no visitors for six months the first time and then for a year and nine months in the last round of that type of punishment.
Q: The economic situation in Cuba is critical and an administration with a Cuban-American at the head of the State Department is coming. What prospects do you see for the country?
There is no better read than the one I made of the faces of the highest-ranking officials who sometimes passed by the cell where I was. I assure you that when they heard that Donald Trump had overwhelmingly won the election they did not know whether to cry or scream; they were very worried. When people started talking about Marco Rubio being the next secretary of state, their concern was noticeable. I am very happy that Marco Rubio will be the next secretary of state. I appreciate him very much and am grateful for his solidarity and support and his tireless defense of freedom and democracy in Cuba.
I do not want my people to continue to suffer hunger and misery, but above all, I do not want my people to continue to be oppressed, exploited or trampled. I do not want my people to continue to be without rights, without basic freedoms such as freedom of expression, association, assembly and demonstration. And for that to be possible, we need a firm[U.S. administration that condemns every abuse, every crime, every demand of the tyranny.
Now, to the extent that we must condemn the dictatorship, that we must sanction the dictatorship, we must think about the means.
I hope that the new administration is firm against the regime, a regime that is not only an enemy of its own people, it is an enemy of freedom and democracy in the world. It is an ally of Putin, Xi Jinping, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the North Koreans, Maduro and his mafia in Venezuela. This regime, so harmful to the Cuban people, to Latin America and to the planet, cannot be rewarded, nor can concessions be made to it.
But we must look for humanitarian mechanisms that can help alleviate hunger and misery, which is mainly the fault of the Castro-communist regime. We must look for solutions, because I would like to see the precarious, critical situation in terms of food and medicine that our people are suffering alleviated.
Many Cubans in exile sometimes forget what they suffered in Cuba and leave. Cuba no longer exists for them or the fight for the democratization of Cuba is relegated to another level. I remind them that we are the main ones responsible for whether Cuba changes. It is in our hands to make the difference with courage, firmness, valor, dedication and love for our land and homeland.
We must unite our efforts, those of us inside and those in exile, whether in the U.S. or elsewhere. We have to work side by side so that our democratizing project is effective, so that the world and Cubans know, so that it is clear to the tyranny that there is no other solution here than freedom, democracy and respect for human rights. So that the world knows that we are not sitting idly, that we are fighting for our rights, and that we deserve support and solidarity.
We know many who say, ‘But who will we support if the majority wants to leave? ’ No, that has to change. There is still a lot to fight for.
©2025 Miami Herald.
Visit miamiherald.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
