The conditions at Carmichael Road Detention Centre are “shameful”, especially for a government that is a part of the British Commonwealth.
This was the opinion of Mr Augusto Villalon, the main mover in the fight for the release to the US Embassy of two Cuban dentists from their 10-month captivity at the Detention Centre.
Doctors Marialys Darias Mesa, and David Gonzalez Mejias, who have visas to enter the US, are languishing at the squalid centre as two governments fight for possession of them. The Bahamas government is in the uncomfortable position of arbitrating that struggle.
Prime Minister Perry Christie now has to decide whether to send the dentists back to Cuba or on to a new life with their families in the US.
“Sanitary facilities are awful,” said Mr Villalon of the Detention Centre where the doctors are now incarcerated. “There is no place to escape the heat, pigeons live with the prisoners and have infected them with lice bites. The guards are abusive.”
Mr Villalon told of a recent incident of a guard selling marijuana to some of the Haitians also imprisoned at the centre. After that incident, he said, the guards threw all of “Dr Marialys’ belongings on the floor, including food and a winter jacket that Ambassador Rood had brought her a couple of days before.”
Mr Villalon said that three young girls, two of them without their parents, are in the women’s barracks under the care of Dr Marialys.
“Last week she told me on the phone that they had brought some young Haitian boys into the women’s barracks because, of their age, the oldest is 14,” said Mr Villalon.
“Dr Marialys complained to me that the boys would come into the open shower room when she took the girls to bathe and that she was very upset by this. Ambassador Rood reported this to the authorities and we expect it will not he repeated.”
Mr Villalon referred to a photograph that showed a fence at the Detention Centre. “Ten feet away from that fence,” he said, “there is another fence keeping us away from the prisoners when Dr Marialys’ husband and I visited her. This is what Bahamians call `Visiting Day’!”
Mr Villalon said that at the urging of Ambassador Rood, Ambassador Joshua Sears visited the prison and met with the two doctors. Mr Sears was emotionally upset by what he saw and said he “would communicate this to his superiors,” said Mr Villalon.
To date, he said, “we have had no notice of any results.” “My last visit to Nassau was February 2 and 3. It was good, in the sense that we were able to visit the doctors in a room instead of at the shameful fence. It was a sad visit in that we saw first hand the conditions in which these people are kept.”
Source: The Tribune
