Luis Manuel Borges Álvarez, known as "El Pollo," a survivor of the sinking of a boat by the Cuban Border Guard Troops in Bahía Honda in 2022, has been on hunger strike and in solitary confinement for over a week in the Provincial Prison of Camagüey, known as Kilo 8, according to a report from the independent portal Cubanet.
The report was made on Tuesday, the 25th, by fellow political prisoners Carlos Alain Abrahantes Valdés and Nelson Amaya, who contacted by phone from inside the high-security prison to raise concerns about the situation of Borges Álvarez.
According to both, on August 21, the prison authorities informed Borges Álvarez about his transfer to another detachment.
Political prisoners believe that the real objective was to separate him from them and from other inmates who frequently denounce the conditions of captivity in that facility.
In response to his refusal, the officers locked him in a punishment cell, and he announced a hunger strike that same day.
The health condition of Borges Álvarez, who is 48 years old, makes the situation particularly serious. He suffers from type 2 diabetes, gastric reflux ulcer, and malabsorption syndrome, and he has only one kidney. At the time he began the protest, he was also experiencing an acute hemorrhoid crisis.
This is not the first time this political prisoner has resorted to a hunger strike. In November 2025, he was transferred precisely to Kilo 8 in retaliation for a similar protest in which he demanded medical attention.
Before that transfer, he had been at the Combinado del Este in Havana, where he was held for two years and eight months in section 47 —designated for inmates sentenced to life imprisonment— without medical treatment, medications, or a special diet.
Borges Álvarez was the boatman of the sunken vessel on October 28, 2022 by the Border Guard Troops in Bahía Honda, Artemisa. In that incident, seven people lost their lives, including a two-year-old girl.
The Cuban regime described the incident as an accident during a human trafficking identification operation, but survivors and family members reported that the boat was deliberately rammed.
Originally from the municipality of Los Palacios in Pinar del Río, Borges Álvarez lived in Miami before being captured in Cuba after the shipwreck.
Two survivors of the sinking who arrived in the United States in December 2022 maintained that the boat was struck by the Coast Guard and reported being pressured in Cuba to alter their testimony about what happened.
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