Inside Castro's Prisons

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A week before leaving Cuba I was taken to the headquarters of the political police to meet Dr. Alvarez Cambra, who was responsible for my physical rehabilitation. Cambra was the author of statements published in a magazine interview maintaining that I had been examined by the best Cuban specialists and that their diagnosis confirmed I was suffering from "deficiency polyneuropathy." They took me to a sports field, and Cambra explained to me that I would, in a very short time, recover the ability to walk straight and that it was a question of readaptation of the brain. Then, during a whole week of intensive exercises, I was made to walk up and down stairs, exercise in the gymnasium, even go out on the track in the worst of the heat.

An hour before my departure for the airport, I ran a lap under the watchful eyes of the generals and colonels of the political police. They could now present me to the entire world. Two hours later I was on a plane to Paris. The resounding impact that the Cuban government expected from this event lasted only a few hours, until I explained I was no longer in a wheelchair only because I had been given the appropriate treatment.

The Cuban government thought I would just lose myself in the Cuban community in Miami, that I would become involved with the conventional anti-Castro movements. Paradoxically, it was the colonels of the political police who were the biggest sponsors of the international opinion campaign initiated on my behalf. I recognize them as having been my best publicity agents and my best literary agents.

Since December, I have received several anonymous threats, but they have not weakened my resolve to continue to expose the horrors of the Cuban regime. Recently in Paris, a person who introduced himself as an official of the Cuban embassy requested a meeting with me to "show me proof that would be made public if I did not refrain from my "counterrevolutionary" activities. My answer caused him to slam down the phone. Subsequently, I received an anonymous telephone call warning me they would make public a film showing me exercising. They were, I presume, hoping to discredit my claims of paralysis. Finally, Fidel Castro wrote to French Communist Party Leader Georges Marchais describing me as a murderer and threatening to supply the proof. I publicly challenged Castro to bring forth his alleged proof. I am not afraid of the result.

The Cuban people are now beginning to awaken to the situation. Thousands of workers have begun to organize an independent trade union. Recently, five trade unionists were sentenced to death and saved only through the mobilization of world opinion. Tens of workers have been sent to prison, and eleven farmers are facing the death penalty because they burned their crops rather than sell them to the government at prices that were unjust.

Hundreds of my compatriots are detained today in political prisons because they refuse to accept "political rehabilitation." For years, these people have been living without clothes, without visitors or correspondence or medical attention, and without sunlight of any kind. Amnesty International, the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States and numerous intellectuals throughout the world have spoken out against this situation.