I joined the political
civilist youth movement in 1991. Curiously, what I remember most from that
period is how my apprehensions led me to disguise myself with a hat and glasses
when traveling from my town of Artemisa to Havana to meet with other activists.
These feelings of fear, defenselessness, and even blame, are common to those
who live in Cuba, stifled by oppression and numbed by endless totalitarian
propaganda.
Three years later, in
1994, I joined the independent press when I covered for Radio Martí the Artemisa
arrest of opposition members, among them the local hero of days past, Domingo
René García Collazo, ex-commander of the Rebel Army, whose rank was given to
him in 1959 by the then-venerable leader, Fidel Castro.
This first report was
followed by others and, around 1995, a group of us activists founded the freedom
desk of the Cuban Independent Press Bureau, under my direction. Afterward, we
created other desks that promoted media, human rights, and union activities in
the region. The state security presence in our lives swelled to the point that
in the early hours of February 24, 1996, state security-equipped paramilitary
groups visited my house along with those of other journalists, human rights
groups, and unions to intimidate us using terrorist language.
From this date
forward, the majority of the city's activists worked together to coordinate press
activities with those of the trade unionism and human rights movements. In this
context, I took on the task of creating the country's first school for the teaching
of these rights. Educating myself from literature provided by the Spanish
Embassy and the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights, I created a manual on
which the curriculum was based and founded the Felix Varela Program for Human
Rights Education. I gave classes until I was arrested in 2003 and I published (in
1999 and 2001) various reports on the subject in the magazine,
Vitral de la Iglesia Catolica of Pinar
del Rio.
State Security
responded to the expansion of my civilist activities, particularly those
related to education and the press, with more arbitrary detentions, searches,
confiscations, warnings, threats, and, eventually, imprisonments. To suffocate
freedom of information and of the press becomes a question of life or death for
dictatorships. Accordingly, the regime used Orwelian artifices to falsify the
past and distort the present, which is a crucial to the manipulation of information
and the creation of propaganda. For this reason, Cuba is the only country in
the Western hemisphere where foreign newspapers are not available and also why
Fidel Castro has called journalists "a unit of the Revolution." That is how the
despot states it. He knows that repression alone is not enough to conquer the
people; instead he must rely on apologetic, incessant, crazy-making, and
chauvinist propaganda that acts as a spiritual sleeping pill and is worth more
than his army of police officers.
But the creative force
of the freedom instinct and the idea of democracy are contagious and won't be
contained. This force always overcomes obstacles in its way and, for more than
20 years, Castro has not been alone on the Cuban political stage. A contingent
of men and women decided to stand up to him in the realm of the word, the mind,
and the spirit, in support of a State of Rights for Cuba. And in spite of the
enormous disadvantages and repression, we arrived with much more than before as
of March 2003, when, faced with the push of the powerful discourse on human
rights, the Varela Project [which advocated for democratic reforms], the force
of the trade unionism, and the fearlessness of the independent press, Castro was
angry, got worked up, and committed a serious mistake: the Cuban Black Spring
and its extrajudicial summary trials, without warrants or defense, that yielded
savage sentences of up to 28 years imprisonment.
And his mistake was so
massive that from it, armed with nothing but gladiolas, our magnificent Ladies
in White emerged. Castro was then forced to face our wives, who, backed by a
formidable international solidarity campaign, dealt the tyrant his most costly
and deathly political defeat: he bowed, for the first time, to mounting
pressure from the people themselves, from the internal opposition, not from the
exterior; and although we had to go into exile,
he had to release us. This fact constitutes a unique case in a half
a century of communism in Cuba, and becomes the supreme example that can
fertilize the social and spiritual womb of our nation.
Faced with the
liberating fertility of this paradigm and the social and economic failure of
the regime, Castro, looking to reduce internal pressure, found himself forced
to "concede" to the people some of the economic rights that for more than 50
years he violated.
In the first days of
our imprisonment we were held in State Security general barracks. There, in
cells intended for four prisoners, it was so narrow and overcrowded that there
was a mere half a square meter per person. These intensely claustrophobic and
oppressive quarters, in which the lights were permanently turned on, constituted
a psychic torment that was applied to the 36 days prior to being interrogated before
the judge.
Under these tortuous
conditions and deprived of pencil, paper, and a lawyer, it was impossible for
me to prepare my defense before the tribunal, where the very principles of
independence and judge impartiality are lacking anyway.
That is where I more
fully understood the terms "defenselessness"
and "abuse of power" in that both were employed to sentence me to an unjust
and brutal 26 years in jail. And paradoxically, on page eight of my sentence,
I'm described as a "person of good and respectful relations with the rest of
the citizens in the social order and lacking criminal antecedents," an
obligatory and cynical acknowledgement that contradicts the brutal sanction which
included the torturous "extra" year spent in a minute, damp, windowless punishment
cell filled with rats and other creatures, and given horrible nourishment,
imposed on someone who was only fulfilling civic duties and exercising his
inalienable rights.
I don't know what made
me deserving of so much hatred. And I'm unable to express here what I felt in
those cells, those tombs. I can, however, and want to unmask those who abuse
power, lie, and offend my dignity by accusing me of being a conspirator and
mercenary.
After a torturous
period in the punishment cells, they integrated me with the general criminal
population and together we shared in the risks, the injustice, and the miserable
physical conditions of the Cuban prison system.
Despite all this, I
should acknowledge that existing within these repressive forces is a growing
number of men and women that silently support us and reject the policies of the
regime. They, too, can contribute to democratic transformations and the
national reconciliation of our people.
And today in exile,
when I recall my seven and a half years in prison, writing you with the new
perspective of a future in freedom feels like a chimera. From this future, my
main objective is to stay faithful to Christian values, to my honor and to my
own law: to fight always as the only dignified attitude before life. My objectives,
also very beloved are:
- To work for a free
press outlet where I can continue on my path as a civilist in support of
democratic ideas in Cuba and elsewhere.
- To complete the book
of essays I began in prison.
Finally, I'd like to pay
my respects to the martyr Orlando
Zapata Tamayo, who discovered how to die as an act of rebellion against
oppression, and to the heroism of Guillermo
Fariñas: protagonists, along with the Ladies in White, of the unpublished
and forceful victory over Castro.
By Alfredo Felipe Fuentes
(Translated by Karen Phillips)
This entry is part of an ongoing series of first-person
stories by Cuban journalists who were imprisoned in a massive roundup of
dissidents that has become known as the Black Spring
of 2003. All of the reporters and editors were convicted in one-day trials,
accused of acting against the "integrity and sovereignty of the
state" or of collaborating with foreign media for the purpose of
"destabilizing the country."
Source:
CPJ
