The New York Review Abroad (50 page)

Prisoners serving harsh sentences at Combinado del Este are kept in galleys with forty to sixty other convicts, and, according to various
sources, are fed so poorly that prison doctors classify their stage of undernourishment as either “moderate,” severe,” or “critical.” The prisoners are allowed one two-hour visit by two family members every two months, and during these visits they can receive as much food as their relatives can carry (no canned goods, or items that require cooking). But many prisoners don’t have good relations with their relatives, or else have relatives who are poor and live so far away that they cannot make the visits on a regular basis. The hunger they suffer is at the heart of the story that the man I talked to felt most compelled to tell, even though his wife gently tried to steer him away from the subject during our conversation.

This man is white. The cot above his in the overcrowded cell was vacated one day, and he began using this space to store the relatively bountiful supplies which his family lugged to prison every two months. Across from this cot was another, occupied by a young black man. My storyteller for some reason was specific about the youth’s race, although he couldn’t recall his crime, or didn’t feel that it was relevant. One night, the man who slept in the cot above the young black man’s (they were stacked in layers of four) discovered him stealing a small jar of preserves that belonged to the storyteller. As punishment, the young black man was severely beaten by the other prisoners. (I did not ask the storyteller what part he had in this.) The young man was taken away to the infirmary, and one month later he was dead. “Not as a result of the beating, you understand, but because he was so hungry. He died of hunger,” my storyteller insisted. And then he repeated several times, in a tight voice, that what he could not get over was the fact that the young man was the same age as his son.

This man was released from prison after John Paul II’s visit, and he is now awaiting an exit permit so that he can go abroad. (I do not mention his name or his other circumstances, not at his request, but out
of my own fear that being quoted in an interview might send him back to prison rather than into exile.) According to a statement released by the Cuban government, seventy-five prisoners had already been freed before the Pope presented his list of 302 political detainees, and seventy “will not be liberated under any circumstances whatsoever.”

According to the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, 115 prisoners, out of the Pope’s list of 302, were released in the days following his visit. But matters are not so simple. Gerardo Sánchez, brother of Elisardo Sánchez and president of the commission, has looked at the records available for these dissenters and found something interesting: a great many of them had already served either half or two thirds of their prison sentences, which is the point at which first and second offenders, respectively, are eligible for parole. Several knowledgeable Cubans confirmed to me that there was nothing unusual in this. As a matter of course, they said, political prisoners are detained long past their parole date, until some important person—Danielle Mitterrand, the Pope—comes to visit and speaks to Fidel on their behalf. No real amnesty is involved.
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Given the conditions under which the members of the Commission for Human Rights have to work, it is remarkable that they can collect or verify any information at all. As a former political prisoner himself, Elisardo Sánchez is not allowed to have a computer or a fax in the house he shares with his brother and several other members of the Sánchez family. Many other commission members or supporters don’t have phones. Many relatives of men and women in jail who might like to give their names to a human rights organization probably don’t know that the commission exists. (The government, of
course, does not volunteer information on the individuals it chooses to keep in jail for crimes of opinion.) Thanks to new information provided by the recently released dissenters, Gerardo Sánchez said, they had only now been able to add to the list of prisoners the name of one man who has been in jail since 1993.

The Sánchezes’ personal situation is difficult, too. Like every other person who has been a political prisoner, Elisardo will probably never be offered a job as anything other than a menial laborer by the government, which is still the only legal employer in Cuba. Gerardo was a union leader until the day in 1980 when they first arrested his brother and charged him with the all-purpose offense of enemy propaganda. He is also out of work. (Relatives living abroad are the main source of support for the Sánchez brothers, as well as most other dissenters, which may help explain why so many of them are white and middle-class.)

Elisardo has a right to a ration card, but what the card provides these days is not really enough to keep a person alive. (And even that is hard to come by for most former prisoners. Two months after his release, one man still had not had his card “reactivated.”) Nevertheless, Gerardo says that over the last few years, conditions for those who disagree with the regime have improved somewhat, most likely as a result of Cuba’s new need to be more responsive to international pressure. The total number of political prisoners has gone down significantly, Gerardo said, and State Security officers, who in the past have sometimes been regular visitors to the Sánchez household, lately have been leaving the brothers in peace. But Gerardo Sánchez insists that none of these changes are significant because the regime has always blown hot and cold on dissenters, and will have a legal justification for its repressive measures until there are fundamental changes in the Constitution and the legal system.

I asked Gerardo whether he thought that the US trade embargo had been a useful weapon against the regime. He shook his head. “Sometimes I have the impression that the embargo reflects a fear that this economic system might really work, that [the people who support the embargo believe] that if it were lifted today, tomorrow socialism would be viable. It probably couldn’t be done overnight, but there should be some thought how to lift the embargo gradually. It would put an end to the regime’s great excuse, which is to say that things are so bad here because of imperialism.”

Thinking of how moderate the Sánchez brothers’ politics are, and how useful the two might be as interlocutors to a regime suffering from severe interior decay and increasing distance from its subjects, I asked Gerardo if the government maintained any sort of regular contact with them: “Of course,” he replied. “In the form of interrogations.” It is hard to avoid the impression that the Revolution prefers the radical, invasion-prone opposition in Florida to the unarmed social-democrat and Christian-democrat activists within, as if Fidel and his comrades were grateful for the opportunity to present themselves—and see themselves—in a more flattering, heroic mold, facing enemy gunfire rather than snooping on people who want the right to register their organization as a fully legal political party.

If being outside the Revolution is difficult in Havana, it must be doubly so in Santiago, a small, sweltering seaport ringed by the hills of the Sierra Maestra, where generations of rebels, including Fidel Castro, have found shelter. Santiago is a fascinating place, but it is not the cosmopolitan center that Havana has been throughout its history. The visual landscape of Havana has remained pretty much unchanged since 1959, but the visitor to downtown Santiago has the impression of having traveled back in time straight into the nineteenth century: tile-roofed houses fronting on empty narrow streets,
an ornate (but empty)
galería
of shops, and—one result of Cuba’s ongoing fuel shortage—spindly carriages drawn by spindly horses. And if in Havana one is sometimes overwhelmed by the sensation that nothing ever happens—no news, no movie openings, no political changes—in Santiago the atmosphere of tedium is ever-present: a weary continuum of uneventfulness that was once happily interrupted by the bustle surrounding the Pope’s visit.

In this small world nonconformists must feel particularly exposed to the glare of official disapproval. I would have liked to ask Dessi Mendoza Rivero, the physician who revealed the existence of a dengue epidemic in Santiago and was sentenced to eight years in prison as a result, how he came to see himself as outside the Revolution and what it was like to be a dissenter in Santiago; but it turned out that he was on the commission’s list of political prisoners who were not released following the papal visit, even though his name was among those presented to the Cuban government on behalf of the Pope.

It may be that Dr. Mendoza was not released because he is considered a particular enemy of the people. What seems undeniable is that he did not overstate the extent or the dangers of the dengue epidemic. In Havana, I talked to a woman who lives in Santiago and whose husband was hospitalized during the epidemic. She says that the resources of the very large general hospital in Santiago were stretched so thin at the height of it that many dengue victims had to lie on cots on the lawns of the hospital grounds awaiting treatment. One morning when she arrived to visit her husband she found him in a state of great agitation. He begged her to take him away. “The young man in the bed on the other side of the aisle died last night. I don’t want to die here,” he said.

With some trepidation, I looked up Dr. Mendoza’s wife, doubting that my visit to her would go unnoticed, or that she would be willing
to expose herself by talking to me, but Caridad Piñón turned out to be a fearless woman. A physician herself, she told me that her husband had been fired from his hospital job in 1995, after he set up the College of Independent Physicians and joined the Human Rights Commission, and that from then until the day of his arrest he had contributed to the family income by selling fritters at the door of the crumbling nineteenth-century house the couple occupies with their three children.

Dr. Piñón is on maternity leave still (her youngest child was twenty days old when Dr Mendoza was arrested), but she knows that when she returns to work she too might lose her job, as outspoken relatives of political prisoners tend to. Still, she talked to me, and all of her answers to my questions seemed to come ringed in exclamation marks. “Me, afraid?” she said when I wondered aloud yet again why someone like her would talk to someone like me. “I told them [State Security] that I would say everything that happened. Imagine if I couldn’t say what is happening to my husband!”