Electroshock Torture In Cuba Alleged -- Ex-Political Prisoners Say They Were Subjected To It

The lawn was manicured, the walls white and immaculate.

In the yard, a few patients played volleyball without a ball, until a delegation of foreigners approached. Then an orderly threw them the ball. They played for a few minutes. When the delegation left, they went back to their rooms. Game over.

Welcome to Havana's Psychiatric Hospital, pride of Cuba, in 1978.

Before 1959 it had been called Mazorra, a name that still stirs feelings of dread and memories of patients screaming in the night, bound naked to their beds by shackles.

Castro promised to invest time, money and expertise to eliminate forever the horror of Mazorra.

Now, 33 years after his experiment began, new stories of horror reminiscent of the Soviet gulags are unfolding. This time, the stories are not about antiquated psychiatric treatment. They are mounting pieces of evidence about the use of shock therapy as a political tool.

"It was a sinister place," said Amaro Gomez Boix, a dissident who was kept there for two weeks in 1978. "I don't know why or how I survived. I guess I hadn't been targeted for destruction."

The memories of many former political prisoners have been painfully reawakened by the recent discovery that a nurse who they said was a torturer now lives in Hialeah, Fla.

Heriberto Mederos, 69, who was a nurse at the Havana hospital from 1945 to 1980, is accused of taking pleasure from administering electroshock to patients. Some former prisoners say he is the Cuban version of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi "Angel of Death."

Mederos, who denies allegations of torture, has said he was following the orders of doctors when he administered shock.

Mederos' name is mentioned by 10 political prisoners and victims of psychiatric torture between 1969 and 1980. Their stories are among 37 told in "The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba," a book published last year by Freedom House and Of Human Rights.

"They would come in at 3 in the morning, four men, who were crazy," Eugenio de Sosa Chabau, 75, remembered recently. "And they would start to call out names. The ones that weren't crazy, myself included, would run and be first. Because after that, the floor was covered with urine and excrement from the others. About six patients were grabbed. They were thrown to the floor, side by side. Right there, on the floor, the electrodes were applied to both sides of their heads. . . . To me they applied most of the shocks to the testicles."

He was sent to the hospital in 1977, after 17 years in prison, accused of conspiring against Castro.

De Sosa, who said he received 14 electroshock treatments in five months, is demanding that the nurse be deported.

Duke Austin, an Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman, said deporting Mederos would take a request by either the U.S. or Cuban governments.

Such a request has been raised only once since 1959. In 1982 a stowaway, a minor, was deported after Cuba and his father demanded his return.

Former psychiatrists at the Havana hospital, now living in Miami, told the Miami Herald they suspected what was going on but didn't do anything because they were either fearful or didn't have a way to prove the abuses.

Ellen Mercer, the American Psychiatric Association's director of the Office of International Affairs, said the organization had received reports about alleged psychiatric abuses in Cuba.

"We found remarkable similarities (with the Soviet Union) on reports we receive from Cuba on this practice to use psychiatry to repress dissent," she said.

Mercer said the American Psychiatric Association wrote to the Cuban psychiatric organization about the abuses but has received no reply.

Frank Calzon, Of Human Rights' executive director and Freedom House representative in Washington, said cases of psychiatric abuses in Cuba were not easily identified, falling under the general category of torture. But after psychiatric horrors in the Soviet Union became publicized, attention was given to exploring such abuses in Cuba.

Visitors to Cuba are frequently taken on tours of health facilities, including Havana's Psychiatric Hospital.

Missing from the usual itinerary are the Carbo-Servia and Castellanos wards. Xavier Zuniga of Amnesty International is one of the few people not associated with the Cuban government to have visited one of them.

Zuniga, who is in charge of the Latin American division of Amnesty International, said he visited Carbo-Servia in March 1988.

"We have no reason to believe that political prisoners were taken there for reasons other than medical," Zuniga said from London recently. "We haven't found a generalized practice, but undoubtedly these practices could have been used to pressure certain political prisoners."

Zuniga said he asked to see "the other ward," Castellanos, "but I was told there wasn't anything else. That contradicted information we had."

Dissidents maintain that the Havana hospital is not the only place where prisoners are subjected to torture.

"They have created an infrastructure, where in each prison there are psychiatrists or psychologists that belong to the state security and whose only goal is to destroy people," said Andres Solares, who in 1982 spent three days in Carbo-Servia because he was organizing a dissident group.

Of the 37 cases detailed in the book, five remain in prison in Cuba. Three are still held in Carbo-Servia, and a fourth one is in another psychiatric hospital.

An update to the book published this year detailed nine new cases. At least five of the prisoners were taken to psychiatric wards as recently as 1991 for "crimes" ranging from writing anti-Castro graffiti to trying to meet with foreign journalists during the Pan-Am games in Havana last year.

"Our emphasis is not to persecute Mederos," Calzon said. "Obviously he is already here, and atrocities are still going on. What we want is for the Cuban government to put a stop to the abuses."