‘You are there and you are not alive’: the harsh testimony of a deported Venezuelan who spent 15 days in Guantanamo

José Daniel Simancas Rodríguez was one of 177 Venezuelans that the US deported and sent to its naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba. He said his 15-day detention was unbearable and compared it to “hell.”

With his hands and feet handcuffed, tied leg to leg with other detainees, José Daniel Simancas Rodríguez was put on a plane. He says he was told he would go to Miami. Hours later, when they landed, Simancas and his fellow passengers were transferred to a bus with the windows covered by bags. By then he already suspected where he had arrived: Guantanamo. What he did not imagine was that this was just the beginning of a nightmare that would last 15 days. Simancas was one of 177 Venezuelans deported by the United States who had been transferred to the US naval base in Cuba, a measure criticized by human rights organizations who say the base is not appropriate for housing migrants. He says he can attest to these complaints: in the place where they locked him up, there was barely a sheet and pillow, they gave him almost no food and he was completely isolated, Simancas told CNN. The only sound that accompanied him during what he describes as “hell” were the screams of the other prisoners. The experience was so unbearable that, he says, he even thought about suicide. Although at some point he had been told that he would be deported, the 30-year-old Venezuelan feared that he would never see his five children again. “I had already completely given up,” he recalls. “That’s what torture is, confinement. You are not alive. You are there and you are not alive, where you don’t know if it is day or night, you don’t really know the time, you are eating poorly, every day that you are there you are dying little by little. I cried every day during those 15 days.”