The writer and former political prisoner from Cuba, Ariel Hidalgo, recounted to CiberCuba how an interrogator from the State Security declared him "completely insane" and sent him the next day to the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana, known as Mazorra, after he suggested that workers should democratically elect the directors of their factories and hospitals.
The incident occurred during one of the interrogations to which Hidalgo was subjected, who specified that it was the third time in his life that he had passed through that place.
At that moment, according to his own testimony, the officer was no longer acting as the "good cop" but as the "bad cop": "The police officer who was interrogating and pounding on the desk and saying outrageous things."
When the interrogator asked him what he wanted for Cuba, Hidalgo set a logical trap for the regime using its own Marxist rhetoric: "What I want for Cuba is for you to fulfill what must be fulfilled. In other words, if you say that all means of production belong to the workers, to the people, to the workers, then it would be correct for all the employees of a factory to choose the factory director."
The proposal was for the election of administrators to flow from the bottom up, not from the top down, applying the same principle to hospitals and any workplace. The official's response was immediate and emphatic: "You are crazy, completely out of your mind."
The following day, Hidalgo was transferred to Mazorra and specifically confined in the Carbó-Serviá Room, which he describes as "the worst place one could be."
"They leave you in the prison section, not only with common prisoners but also with the insane, the mentally ill. There are many, many rapists, many murderers. If something happens to you there, there is nothing, and nothing happens," he detailed.
Hidalgo himself claims to know that in that room they once burned a political prisoner: “They burned him and locked him up. And nothing happened.”
The use of Mazorra as a tool for political repression was not an isolated case. Cubalex documented in 2024 between 20 and 30 cases of opponents subjected to forced psychiatric evaluations and treatments in the last 15 years in Cuba.
Multiple testimonies and human rights organizations identified the Carbó-Serviá Ward as a facility under the control of State Security, where electroshocks were administered without anesthesia and forced medication was used to break down dissidents.
Hidalgo is the author of the essay «Cuba, the Marxist State and the New Class», for which he was sentenced to eight years in prison in 1981 following the confiscation of his manuscript.
The work denounced precisely the formation of a privileged bureaucracy that contradicted the principles proclaimed by the revolution. Amnesty International considered him a prisoner of conscience.
During his imprisonment at Combinado del Este, he co-founded, along with Ricardo Bofill and other inmates, the Cuban Committee for Human Rights in October 1983, which is considered the first organization of its kind in Cuba. He was released in 1988 on the condition that he leave the country permanently and now resides in Miami.
The case of Hidalgo is not the only instance in which the regime turned to Mazorra to silence those who challenged them: Daniel Llorente, who waved a United States flag in the Plaza de la Revolución, was also sent to that psychiatric hospital by the Cuban authorities.
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