Luis Manuel Borges Álvarez, known as "El Pollo," survivor of the sinking of a boat by Cuban Border Guard Troops in Bahía Honda in 2022, has been on hunger strike and in punitive isolation 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 within the high-security prison to alert about Borges Álvarez's situation.
According to both, on August 21, the prison authorities informed Borges Álvarez of his transfer to another detention facility.
Political prisoners believe that the real objective was to separate him from them and from other inmates who frequently denounce the conditions of confinement in that facility.
In response to his refusal, the officers placed him in a punishment cell, and he responded by declaring a hunger strike that same day.
The health condition of Borges Álvarez, 48 years old, makes the situation especially serious. He suffers from type 2 diabetes, an ulcer with gastric reflux, and malabsorption syndrome, and he has only one kidney. At the time of starting the protest, he was also experiencing an acute hemorrhoid crisis.
This is not the first time that this political prisoner has resorted to a hunger strike. In November 2025, he was moved to Kilo 8 as a reprisal for a similar protest in which he demanded medical attention.
Before that transfer, he had been held in the Combinado del Este in Havana, where he was kept for two years and eight months in section 47—designated for inmates sentenced to life imprisonment—without medical treatment, medication, or special diet.
Borges Álvarez was the boatman of the sunken vessel on October 28, 2022 by members of 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 characterized the incident as an accident during a human trafficking identification operation, but survivors and family members alleged that the vessel was deliberately rammed.
Originally from the municipality of Los Palacios in Pinar del Río, Borges Álvarez resided in Miami before being captured in Cuba following the shipwreck.
Two survivors of the sinking who arrived in the United States in December 2022 maintained that the boat was hit by the Coast Guard, and reported being pressured in Cuba to alter their testimony about what happened.
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