Inside Castro's Prisons

• Share

(2 of 7)

There are almost 140,000 political and criminal prisoners in 68 penitentiaries throughout Cuba. In Havana province, for example, one finds prisons such as the Combinado del Este where I was imprisoned and which, at one time, held up to 13,500 detainees. In addition, more than 30 farm prisons and concentration camps are scattered around the island, including one camp that is exclusively for young girls and another that is reserved for young boys. There are also Frentes Abiertos (Open Fronts), which consist of groups of prisoners who are serving light sentences or who are about to be released. These detainees travel around the island constructing roads, schools, dairies and buildings. Tourists who see these men on the construction sites do not suspect that they are in fact prisoners who have accepted "political rehabilitation." Havana province alone has six such groups.

I myself spent the major part of my detention in high-security prisons, at first in La Cabaña prison. There, political prisoners from Havana province were executed by firing squad against an execution wall that had been set in the fortress' 200-year-old draining ditches. Night after night the firing was punctuated with cries of "Long live Christ the King!" and "Down with Communism!" from prisoners as they went to their deaths. From 1963 on, they were gagged.

I remained in La Cabaña only a few days before being transferred to an island south of Cuba called Isla de Pinos.* It had been converted by the Communists into the Siberia of the Americas. In conditions identical to those of the Soviet concentration camps under Stalin, the Cuban authorities had made Isla de Pinos the detention area for political prisoners who were sentenced to forced labor.

There, a prisoner's life was worthless. I saw many of my companions murdered. The first of them was Ernesto Diaz Madruga, who was bayoneted to death by the officer responsible for the application of camp regulations. Thus began a campaign of terror that resulted in numerous deaths and mutilations. In April 1961, 13½ tons of dynamite were placed in each building to blow us up in the event of an attack on Cuba. I held one of these murderous cartridges in my hands. They were made in Canada; evidently Castro had very little confidence in the efficiency of Soviet explosives. In Guanajay prison I recall witnessing the visit of a group of Soviet penal experts. All the political prisoners chanted in unison, "Soviets go home"; they were rewarded with the harshest of floggings.

For a long time I worked in agricultural camps and marble quarries. It was exhausting. We were victims of the constant blows of the officers responsible for the work squads. A few years later, I was taken to the Boniato prison in Oriente province. All the doors and windows were steel-shuttered. That period was one of the worst. But I felt myself neither alone nor abandoned because God was with me inside that jail. The greater the hatred my jailers directed at me, the more my heart brimmed over with Christian love and faith. I never felt hatred for my jailers, and even today, with the detachment of time, I offer prayers for them that they might repent. Once I succeeded in getting hold of a small Bible, but the soldiers ultimately found it and furiously tore it to shreds.