BY GERARDO REYES
El Nuevo Herald

Yurizán González thought his ordeal was over after his kidnappers made a cut on his ear in a room of an old abandoned house in Cancún, the resort southeast of Mexico where he was held captive.

But the torture session continued, he said, when the captors removed the cloth plug they had placed in his mouth to mute his screaming and replaced it with a gun muzzle.

``Right there I thought they were going to kill me,'' González said in an interview with El Nuevo Herald at Las Agujas Immigration Station south of this city.

González, 31, is one of several undocumented Cubans who, during the first two weeks of September, were tortured, beaten and threatened by a band of human smugglers. Some of his captors were Cubans from Miami and others were Mexican, according to the victims' descriptions given to El Nuevo Herald and Mexican officials.

The Cubans said their captors were outraged because they had refused to pay for the smuggling trip as they promised upon arrival in Mexico. They were ushered out of Cuba on a fast boat that took them to Mexican beaches, then beaten and tortured to send a frightening message to their relatives in the United States and Europe. Some were subjected to electric shocks, two of them said.

González said that when his face was bloody and he had the gun in his mouth, one of the captors took a picture of him with his cellphone and told him the photo would be sent to his relatives in Oregon.

González's relatives in Portland did not get the photo, but they received a call in which they heard his screaming in the background, said González's cousin, Yunia Curbelo.

``I overheard the beating, and he was screaming. . . . They called many times, at every hour, threatening that they were going to send him to me in pieces, but we didn't have that money,'' Curbelo said.

Minutes after Curbelo heard González screaming, her boyfriend, Carlos Téllez Nápoles, received a call on his cellphone. ``They told me the money was not necessary anymore,'' Téllez said. ``That they had already killed him.''

The next day, Sept. 12, the kidnappers denied killing him and demanded a ransom of $5,000. The men demanded that the deposits for the ransom be made through a bank account in Miami, Téllez said.

In a visitors area at the immigration station, González showed an El Nuevo Herald reporter the stitches on his left earlobe and still-fresh bruises from the beating with flat machetes on his back, his legs and his left shoulder.

According to González, the kidnappers also cut the ears of other three Cubans, this time with a knife. Another two were given electrical shocks with a lamp cable.

``They peeled the ends of the cable and applied it to their tongues or to body parts, leaving them dizzy and almost unconscious,'' he said.

According to testimony by relatives and victims, the people involved in watching, torturing and calling to demand ransom money, live or have lived in Miami.

Ditsán Farradaz Ulloa, arrested in Mexico and charged with kidnapping, appears in Florida's public records with addresses in Kissimmee and Miami. Several messages at a telephone registered under the Kissimmee address were not returned.

Farradaz was in charge of the custody of the Cubans at the house in Cancún, but did not take an active part in the torturing, the victims said. The people in charge of torturing were two Mexicans and three Cubans who showed up at the house every afternoon beginning Sept. 9, apparently drunk or drugged, the victims said.

Then they started calling the relatives to collect the $10,000 fee for getting the captives out of Cuba. When they learned the relatives couldn't pay, they began beating the captives with flat machetes and sticks, according to accounts.

``I had never heard of any situation this serious and savagely violent against undocumented Cubans,'' said Cuban attorney Eduardo Matías López, director of the Cuban-American Civic Association.

Threatened that they would be sent to another house where the Mexican torturers would cut off their fingers with cigar clips and rape them, the Cubans wrote S.O.S. messages that they threw to the streets and yards neighboring the house in Cancún.

They were rescued by the Mexican military two weeks after they arrived from Cuba.