Ángel Cuadra

“I already explained to you that we wrote in prison and that I never stopped writing and getting my things out of prison. A poem that I admire very much and that I love very much, since I put all my heart in it, was the poem that I wrote in the memory of Jan Palach, the young student who burnt himself in St Wenceslas Square, in protest against the Soviet tanks in the Czechoslovak Republic at that time. I had read in a magazine about the attitude of Jan Palach. He was a young student who suffered the offense that a foreign country was going to dictate guidelines and to usurp his people. I saw him as a symbol of his nation, as he understood that his sacrifice was worthwhile to historically counteract what the Soviet aggression meant to that country. I was moved to such an extent that when the authorities let us calm down and did not torture us in those days, we met in my cell, in the cells of the Guanajay prison, and we did some practice among ourselves. And it occurred to us one day to write a poem, we were five imprisoned poets, and it occurred to me to write something about Jan Palach. And there we premiered it in my cell. I brought with me today the book, the pamphlet with the poem about Jan Palach, the Violent Requiem for Jan Palach. And here it says: A historical poem for the young Czechoslovakian who committed suicide in protest against the Soviet invasion of his homeland. The poem is long, I understand it as one of the best that I could have written. I was lucky to be able to get it out of prison, and to be able to reproduce it, and send it later, translated into English, into the hands of Václav Havel.”

“And many nights, we would hear when they took someone away—in the small cart that transported them—they would give the commands: Ready, aim... And before the fire order was given, we would hear the person scream: Long live free Cuba! Long live Christ the King! It’s a harrowing experience. It’s terrifying to hear it at night. Sometimes, it was a fellow prisoner, someone who had left for trial and never returned.”

“We sympathized at the beginning with the Revolution when we understood the Revolution to be something other than what it later became. It was originally not a Communist project, it was simply a return to the institutionality, to reestablish the 1940 Constitution, so, to return to the political status that had existed before. When the Revolution or the insurrection triumphed, we felt disappointed because it led to a path that we did not want; so then I started to act against that process and I formed part of a counterrevolutionary group, as they called it, while we really believed that it was actually and really revolutionary, while the counterrevolutionaries were the ones who together with Fidel Castro were usurping power and derailing that process towards an undesired path. In this activity, above all, I was in charge of belonging to the political group of Revolutionary National Unity, with the acronym of UNaRe. There I basically edited a pamphlet, a clandestine periodical called Democratic Cuba, in contrast to the Socialist Cuba. Well, we had men shot there, there were four of our people… I did not have to take part in the action, but in the ideological direction, and in the distribution of the weekly sheet that we made. That led me to not want to leave the country, although they got me an offer of asylum in the Uruguayan embassy, but I understood that I already had the commitment with the other brothers of ours who were in jail or who had been killed, and I rejected that offer made by a magnificent lady, Dr Esperanza Peña, who had offered me that asylum in the embassy of Peru [sic] in Havana. But I did not want that, I stayed until the last possible moment. And the last moment was that they arrested me.”

“I was subjected to a process that is well known by those who have lived in countries with totalitarian regimes, fundamentally Communism, and also Nazism. They gave me a 15-year sentence. I kept writing in prison. With many difficulties, because it was very difficult to smuggle the things that one wrote out of prison. But then, I was with the group of the ‘planted’, which means, the prisoners who had decided to reject any kind of committed attitude towards the regime. And we were against all that process, and there in the prison we continued our activities. The process was so interesting that many men who had never thought of creating a painting or writing a poem, in jail, as a form of channeling their angst, began to write. And they became poets. Although they say that one does not become a poet, that one is born as a poet. But really, as the psychologists say, to channel the angst, the loneliness and the repression, as the regime was very repressive, many began to write poetry. Many afterwards discovered in their interior this possibility, or sensitivity that was unknown to them, and they continued to write after that stimulus of being imprisoned.”

“Castro was is lucky that the main leaders of the other groups died, and so he practically remained alone with great skill, but he also stayed with the connections we did not know about, with the Communist International. When we realized, it was already late. But before that, we thought that it was worth following him as a leader. Then we realized, as the process progressed, that he had ambitions of a very great dictator, that he was feeling sympathy to totalitarianism, that he was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, that he was an admirer of Benito Mussolini and Stalin. And really, he was like a summary of those dictators, and that's why, when I got disenchanted with the Castro, I had three possibilities. Or I stayed in Cuba, enjoying, like many people, the benefits I could have, because I had a position as a lawyer of an organization, or I was leaving the country, and I did not want to leave, because I wanted to follow the destiny of my people... So or I kept fighting, or I was leaving the country, or I simply joined the regime.”

“The most humiliating thing in prison is the mistreatment by some of the guards when they are given specific orders. The most humiliating experience was what those who were sent to the Isla de Pinos suffered—I later shared time with them, so I know everything because I became part of their group and experienced it all with them. And that was the most degrading: when they were thrown into areas where the wastewater ran. The humiliation of having to strip naked when going out for a visit—that is one of the most degrading things that exist. And it’s not even about the beatings, because one learns to endure those. The ones who suffered the worst in the prison of Isla de Pinos, whom I joined, endured it too. That kind of suffering is even seen as a mark of pride—like the blow I received near my ear that left a scar, but it only happened once. Others who came from Isla de Pinos, as I mentioned, had scars from their wounds because they were forced to work while being stabbed with bayonets.”

“One day, at dawn, around four in the morning, the entire block was surrounded by police. At that hour, loud knocks woke my parents. That’s when they arrested me, with guns pointed at me, and took me to State Security. State Security is an unbelievable world—it truly feels like hell. It reminds me of 1984 by George Orwell. They locked me in a cell where I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. There was only a small opening at the top, through which a soldier would occasionally bring some food. But we had no contact with the outside world—we were completely isolated. They kept me there for two months. The problem was that when they interrogated me, I would argue with the interrogator. On those nights, they would turn the cell’s temperature freezing cold—it was unbearable, and I had nothing to cover myself with.”