Freedom, personally
By Manuel Vasquez Portal Posted Jan 1 2005
Photo courtesy of author
Portal and his wife Yolanda at home.
(Emily Dulcan translated the article from Spanish.)
After one year, three months and four days, they returned me home. My wife, Yolanda Huerga Cedeńo, had become thinner, the skin around her eyes crinkled with all the lonely nights and days full of fear, her leg in a cast after a dark accident. She did not even know I was coming. My son, Gabriel, barely 10 years old, taciturn, suffering, gave me a trembling embrace, and tears danced in his eyes.
My time in prison had been lengthy, painful, oppressive. I was confined, my skin covered in hives from the insects; my stomach ruined, convulsed by the bad food and pestilence of the penitentiary; my soul anxious, not knowing what had become of my family. They suffered, waiting for me. They waited for the next thing the political police from the Department of State Security would deprive them of.
My wife told the beginning of our ordeal to the foreign press, “On March 19, 2003, between 5:30 and 5:45 in the evening, when I opened the door of my house to the political police, I knew that my family was about to get smaller and that my 9-year-old son was going to have to grow up very quickly … Fourteen men came up to my apartment with cameras, video recorders and other equipment … They meticulously examined everything, every piece of furniture and drawer. They flipped through the pages of books, searched through our clothes, read all of our papers, looked at our photographs. At around 10:00 p.m., they finished picking through the bones of our home, and they took Manuel away.”
What were they looking for? Were they pursuing a dangerous terrorist, an infamous drug trafficker, a fierce serial killer? No! A superior told them to arrest a simple man who writes, a man who has an opinion.
Beginning in the early 1970s, I went back and forth between working as a secondary school teacher and as a poet and journalist. I was a young man of 20 who dreamed of beauty and liberty. In the 1980s, as a reporter for Editora Abril of the Young Communists’ Union, I worked with the major newspapers and magazines in the country, and received several awards. In the 1990s, I began to dissent by conducting independent journalism, having broken all ties with officialdom. My life story was altered, transformed by insults and names invented by the Ministry of the Interior.
Barely 15 days after my arrest and indictment, and without having met my lawyer, a tribunal of the Ministry of Justice sentenced me to 18 years in prison.
PRISON, PERSONALLY
At dawn, April 25, 2003, I met prison personally. I saw tangled wire, high walls, ditches, sentry houses, guards with bayonets and clubs, prison dogs, bars.
I had arrived at Boniato penitentiary, in the Santiago de Cuba province, more than 560 miles (900 km.) from home. Perhaps the harshest region in the country, it is known as death’s antechamber.
In a barred entry room, with peeling walls and dim light, they took away my clothes. I stood in my underpants, surrounded by guards and dogs, until they gave me a pair of shorts and a shirt without a neck or sleeves. For sleeping, they gave me an old mattress, ripped, dirty, and hard. My quarters – for who knew how long – were a small dark cell, festering with gutters in the ceiling that overflowed daily with the water from the hallway. There was neither a table nor a chair, neither sheets nor pillows, neither mosquito netting nor blankets, neither radio nor television, no news, no books, no cups, no towels, no religious services. No! It did not seem possible. That environment shamelessly violated the minimum requirements for the treatment of prisoners adopted by the United Nations in 1955. When I asked the penitentiary authorities if they were familiar with these minimum requirements, they responded: No! Which meant: The requirements are not important to us; here we are in charge, and nobody else is to oversee us.
RESISTANCE
I was totally defenseless. I was already condemned. I was already imprisoned. They assumed that I was also silenced. They thought that the terror unleashed against me and my 74 fellow prisoners would silence us. A journalist to my core, a jail cannot muzzle me, nor could the draconian Law 88, under the articles of which we all had been judged.
Even in the earliest days, while locked up in the political police’s headquarters in Havana, I knew I had to bring the truth forth to continue the struggle against injustice. The plan was simple – get information out of the prison at all cost. I started a diary of hurried notes, which I had to hide from daily cell searches. But without fear, I authorized its publication. There I wrote, “There is nothing more unjust or disturbing than if they have condemned me to 18 years without liberty for the simple act of being a journalist.” My fate had been cast but my persistence did not yield. I wrote chronologies, letters, and poems, all of which secretly left the prison and were published abroad.
The Cuban government tried to keep its brutality quiet. With that in mind, they chose the right time to seize, sentence, and imprison us – the war against Iraq presented the best imaginable smoke screen. I, at least, was not going to allow the atrocities against free expression and human rights to remain in the shadow.
The world was receptive and stood in solidarity with us. The Committee to Protect Journalists honored me in 2003 with its annual award for freedom of expression. Hundreds of writers and journalists from around the world sent letters to President Fidel Castro asking for my release. Senator Philippe Richert of the Low-Rhine in France solicited President Jacques Chirac to intervene. Amnesty International immediately declared us prisoners of conscience. The European Union adopted punitive measures against the Cuban government. From the isolation of our cells and with the support of international public opinion, we sat the government in the defendant’s chair, the very chair they had prepared for us.
But the public campaigns weren’t enough. We had to show that we were willing to die for our ideas. Together with journalists Normando Hernandez and Juan Carlos Herrera and political dissidents Prospero Gainza and Newlso Aguiar, I began a hunger strike Sept. 1, 2003. In the deep of night, we were handcuffed and taken, without our families’ knowing, to our next destination, Aguadores prison.
In the new jail, conditions were just as bad and in some cases even worse. On Nov. 9, 2003, together with opposition member Agustin Cervantes and 13 other prisoners, I began a second hunger strike.
My health began to deteriorate. In January, I was taken to the hospital where I was diagnosed with a lesion on my right lung, caused by emphysema and high blood pressure.
In February, I was sent back to Boniato, where again I refused to eat. My fast lasted 18 days. Those in charge of the penitentiary decided to offer me food from the small prison hospital.
After my family visited April 30 (visits were allowed every three months), I felt obliged to declare another hunger strike. The prison officials stubbornly refused to give me the food and books my family had brought. This, despite the fact that my wife had traveled more than 560 miles (900 km.) with her leg in a cast, after a suspicious dog knocked her down in the middle of the street days before her visit. There was no other way to protest but to initiate a strike. My complaints fell upon deaf ears. I knew that my health would get worse, but I could not tolerate such insults.
RETURN
As a result of this last hunger strike, I was readmitted to the hospital. Secluded there, I was shocked when I was taken back home.
On June 23, the world that had stopped March 19, 2003, began turning again. From the window of the small microbus I watched the cities stream past my avid gaze. I suffered from dizziness and nausea. The world made my head spin. I vomited. I vomited, perhaps, all of the phantom images that prison had deposited in my stomach and my spirit. Up came the young Yan Jose Alzola, shot in the head by a guard; the blind Norges Cervantes, who staggered in his filthy cell; the knife that Jorge Ochoa stabbed into the neck of Urbano Escalona, a homosexual with AIDS, in the middle of the prison yard; the German shepherd dog that, at a guard’s command, tore Emni Echavarria to pieces in his own cell; the lips of Prospero Gainze, which were sewn with thread from a nylon sack. Up came the nightmares, the beatings and screams of prisoners, the sickness by the rotting food, the interminable wait behind thick, impassable bars.
After one year, three months, and four days, they returned me home. They gave me a leave due to my illness. My wife, who had become thinner, didn’t know that I was coming. My son clasped his arms around my neck, and tears danced in his eyes. But I am not free. Cuba is not free. And perhaps by signing this account I will be forced to return to the motionless world of nightmares that is the Cuban prison, an undeserved end for people who think, write, and disagree with oppression.
But here it goes, signed in Havana, October 2004.