In the same sense that Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom want to limit what is said on the internet, including parody and humorous comments, totalitarianism has also prevented citizens for decades from accessing means of expression to criticize the State.

The Cuban case is iconic in that sense. And the Cuban technology businessman, Raudel García Bringas, can testify to this. He was 34 years old when the military handcuffed and arrested him one morning in 2012 in Havana. They accused him of starting a business in a socialist system that hates private initiative and possibly building the first digital network independent of the state telecommunications monopoly, ETECSA. In short: undermining state control of information and news.

A member of the Batabanó Baptist Church since 1994 and a student at the Rafael A. Ocaña Theological Seminary between 1995 and 2000, he continued to serve as a local preacher, while building a career as a businessman in the IT field with foreign embassies and Cuban private clients.

Raudel started out as a self-taught entrepreneur when Castroism had not yet given the go-ahead to expand self-employment, in order to seduce Barack Obama in pursuit of a diplomatic thaw. His life would change radically as a result.

About the period of his imprisonment, he wrote a memoir entitled, “The Challenge of Living in Cuba: Between Acceptance and Rejection.” From a Christian worldview, which strengthened him at that time, he recapitulated the criminal proceedings in which he was involved and what life was like in at least three Cuban prisons.

March 2024 marked a decade since the trial against him. Raudel recalled, for CubaNet, those traumatic events while Castroism sells, now to the administration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the image of respect for private businessmen and political prisoners.

Here is my interview with Raudel.

You were sentenced to three years in prison for “illicit economic activity,” but I understand that the surveillance on you was prior to your arrest in 2012. Is that so?

Before September 2012, my work began to be noticed by the Department of State Security, when I began to work at the Brazilian Embassy in Cuba as a computer scientist. I then moved to the Chilean Embassy and finally started my own business project in Cuba at the end of 2007, offering satellite internet connection services to embassies, the Hughesnet systems. My company is the oldest in Cuba and we still have active clients today.

At the end of 2008 we started working on a new telecommunications project that consisted of creating a platform parallel to ETECSA where we route telephone calls from abroad to Cuba. There is no product or equipment in the telecommunications market that can be compared to what we did.

Everything was the product of a small team. My contribution in this case was to adapt satellite internet systems to use them to pass telephone calls. The equipment we used was designed by ourselves and we had it manufactured exclusively for use in Cuba.

Today IP telephony is very common, but even with the development of telecommunications there are no possible parallels like what we did in Cuba and exclusively for Cuba. These were obviously designed based on knowledge we gained about how telecommunications work in Cuba, including the configuration of their telephone exchanges.

After this, you can draw your own conclusions. Our project was operational in Cuba for three years. We were generally always one step ahead of the telecommunications espionage that the regime itself maintained.

It may look like many things, but believe me, it was only business. Yes, it could have been used for anything, and in fact it would have always been successful, but our interest was only to do business, and that is what I have always dedicated myself to. There is no evidence to the contrary.

How did you get arrested? What were you accused of?

I was arrested on September 5, 2012, by the same Counterintelligence division that prosecuted Alan Gross; in fact, we were together at the “Carlos J. Finlay” Military Hospital in Havana.

The American who imported technology to provide clandestine and free internet service?

Yes, he did.

I was interrogated by the Political Police. They prosecuted my case before the Eighth Chamber for Crimes against State Security on March 6, 2014. Obviously, although the Prosecutor’s file does not mention them, they were always present in one way or another, and officers of that repressive body also participated in interrogations at [the police unit at] 100 and Aldabó.

They accused me of being an intelligence agent for the Israeli Mossad, after a series of crazy and unfounded accusations. Although they were never proven, they are still valid to this day, which is why I cannot return to Cuba.

Initially, I tried to make them understand that what I was doing was not “political,” something I naively believed. It is obvious that if you are prosecuted by the State Security Organs, you are a political case; only I was unable to see it at that time of so much confusion.

On December 7, 2012, when they began to publish my case for the first time in the state press, it had already been a political case for a long time.

The use of medicine and clinical facilities for torture and mistreatment has been documented in recent Cuban history. In your book you talk about it.

All of us who have been in 100 and Aldabó will undoubtedly agree that it is a place designed to psychologically break any person.

I witnessed how many who were with me, in the same cell, after about 30 days there, suffered from psychological symptoms of suffocation. Others could not bear being confined and tried to commit suicide. At least on my floor, the normal rate was about three or four suicide attempts per month. I don't know about the other floors.

The anxiety crisis I had on 100 and Aldabó was provoked. At that time I was still far from knowing many things that are obvious to me today. None of the doctors who have treated me in the United States consider that it was the product of a natural process. Perhaps it would have been “natural” in the first 30 to 40 days of captivity.

I myself agree with this opinion. My case is atypical: the crisis arose on the 72nd day of living in those conditions.

Regarding how it arose, although I believe that no one from the Ministry of the Interior will affirm or deny it, due to the symptoms I had, it is very certain that it began when small doses of psychotropic drugs were placed on my food tray. Over time, this created addiction in my body.

What symptoms did you experience?

My body’s response to the absence of these would naturally be a nervous breakdown, a very high level of anxiety. Within a period of 72 hours from the beginning of the first symptoms, I completely lost sleep and began to experience tremors in my hands and feet. It was terrifying.

My thoughts were running at an incredible speed to the point that I was running out of words because I couldn't express myself correctly. I started making faces with my mouth and nose; they were nervous tics.

I already knew those symptoms that I saw in cases of alcoholic patients who were admitted to enter into the process of abstinence. Mine were exactly the same, except that I am not an alcoholic. I overcame the nervous breakdown by the mercy of God.

No one attended to me medically, no one did anything. Only about three weeks after that episode, and while I was still at 100 and Aldabó, they took me to the Medical Examiner's Office for a diagnosis.

They were all military doctors. They asked me several questions. I answered the ones I thought I should answer and omitted information that I understood I shouldn't tell them, but, to my surprise, they were able to manage the conversation to the point that they made me experience, perhaps for 10 or 15 minutes, the same symptoms that I had overcome weeks before.

The same psychiatrists at Villa Marista, the headquarters of the Political Police, told me that there were after-effects, so I would need to continue being treated. The main one was with sleep. As the months went by, already in the Valle Grande prison and later in the La Covadonga Prison Ward, that mark became deeper.

In what sense?

In the La Covadonga Prison Ward they gave me drugs to help me sleep for the first time. I was there for exactly a year, in a large ward for prisoners, but without windows.

Then the Political Police moved me to the maximum security prison of Combinado del Este, under the accusation of an alleged mass escape plan. A few days after being in Combinado they moved me to the ward of the State Security Department at the “Carlos J. Finlay” Military Hospital, in Marianao. It was there that they began to give me high doses of drugs to help me sleep.

Within a few weeks my body had already assimilated those doses, and then they changed my medications to much stronger ones, which I am dependent on to this day. The established rule for these psychotropic drugs is that they must be administered in controlled doses, for no more than three weeks. Four weeks can be very risky not only because of the harmfulness of the medication but also because of the addiction it creates.

I was given all of those medications in very high doses for a year.

I successfully managed to lower the doses to a certain point, but I couldn't get rid of them. Today, they no longer help with sleep, but I can't get rid of them either.

Because of that, you were in other extreme situations, right?

Yes. I had a clot at the end of 2016 due to the toxins from the medications that they began to give me in high doses since 2014. It was lucky that it remained in a secondary vein. If it had appeared in a main artery, I would have needed a very big miracle to survive. Since then, I have added another medication to my list of medications that is an anticoagulant and prevents another clot from forming.

Even so, you have told me that you are a lucky man. In what sense?

Another person taking all those medications for so long until today would very likely not be able to maintain a balanced life, due to the number of side effects. That has not been my case.

By divine grace, today I am still active in my duties as a father and professional. I have completed two master’s degrees and four postgraduate degrees in international universities in different time zones in record time, and I have obtained outstanding grades.

My life is not normal, it will never be due to the medications, experiences, and after-effects that remain, but it is something that I have learned to manage without anyone around me feeling affected. I am grateful for that. I do not complain, I just try to live gratefully.