“Lisdiany called me because Lisdany is pregnant. Her [Lisdany’s] husband is also in prison but she has been with him for many years and had never been able to get pregnant. Coincidentally, she is pregnant now. And well, she is six weeks, almost seven,” the mother is heard saying. ”They are not giving her good food there because in reality there is no food there, there is no medicine, there is nothing.”
“Now State Security wants to force her to remove [abort] the baby. And then she told me that she was going to see if I would report this because she doesn’t want to take the child out,” she continues. “She feels very bad. There is no Gravinol for dizziness, they don’t have any medicine in there to give you.”
Barbarita Isaac Rojas
confirmed
her daughter’s current precarious situation to the Argentine news outlet
Infobae
on Thursday, noting that her daughter’s husband is also a political prisoner.
“They want my daughter to have an abortion but she doesn’t want to because she has always hoped to have a baby,” Isaac Rojas said. “I didn’t imagine the moment it happened but they [her daughter and her husband] want to have it.”
“The situation there is terrible because there is no food or medicine. She feels bad and there is not even anything to eat,” she continued. “I want you to help and support her.”
Prisoners Defenders’ president, Javier Larrondo, provided Infobae with the following statement:
State Security is forcing prisoner of conscience Lisdany Rodriguez Isaac to have an abortion against her will. Lisdany, a member of the Free Yorubas of Cuba, is serving an eight-year sentence in the Guamajal women’s prison in Santa Clara for peacefully demonstrating on July 11, 2021 and for being a parishioner of the Free Yorubas of Cuba association.
He continued:
Lisdany and her husband, after years of waiting to have a child, had a meeting in the ward and, to their surprise, she became pregnant with a much-desired child. She is almost seven weeks pregnant. State Security officers at Guamajal prison want to force her to have an abortion, she does not receive any medical attention, they keep her without food or medicine and they coerce her to abort this baby that the couple wanted.
“A forced abortion against a mother’s will and for no clinical reason is nothing short of murder as a product of state terrorism,” Larrondo concluded.
The United Nations
denounced
the persecution of religious communities under the Castro Regime using a report published by Prisoners Defenders in 2022 as a basis.
The report contains 56 written statements from religious leaders of Cuba’s four most popular religions:
santería
, Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, and Islam. The statements detail how the communist Castro regime “represses and controls in an absolutist manner” religious practices in Cuba, creating fictitious groups in the hands of the Communist Party through the Office of Attention to Religious Affairs (OAAR). The Rodríguez Isaac siblings’ case is one of the examples of religious persecution listed in the report.
As of December, Prisoner Defenders has
registered
1,062 political prisoners in Cuba.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter
here
.