Most prisoners face malnourishment on the prison diet and suffer in overcrowded cells without sufficient medical attention. Prison authorities restrict inmates' access to receiving religious guidance, in some cases with interrogations about their religious beliefs. In some prisons, pre-trial detainees are held together with convicts and minors with adults. Minors also risk indefinite detention in juvenile facilities. Cuba''s confinement of nonviolent political prisoners with prisoners convicted of violent crimes is degrading and dangerous.
Guards impose undue restrictions on political prisoners' visits with family members.
Prison authorities have also punished political prisoners who denounced prison abuses or failed to participate in political reeducation or wear prison uniforms. Many Cuban political prisoners have spent excessive periods in pretrial detention, often in isolation cells. Following conviction, they have faced additional punitive periods in solitary confinement. Police or prison guards often heightened the punitive nature of solitary confinement with additional sensory deprivation, by darkening cells, removing clothing, or restricting food and water. The punitive and intimidatory measures against political prisoners that caused severe pain and suffering and the retaliations against those who denounced abuses violated Cuba's obligations under the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which it ratified in 1995.