The
unyielding ones
Carlos
Alberto Montaner
George W. Bush
has just bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Dr. Oscar Elías
Biscet, a prisoner of conscience who was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment.
It was a gesture of solidarity for which almost all Cubans are grateful. One
of the most prized awards in the United States, it was created by Kennedy in
1963 and has been presented to personages like Nelson Mandela and the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Of course, Mandela and King are two of Biscet's
three sources of inspiration. The other is Mohandas Gandhi.
Like them,
Biscet is a pacifist who rejects violence and defends human rights. One of
the reasons why he was imprisoned is that he denounced the large number of
abortions done on the island. More abortions are performed in Cuba than
deliveries. Biscet is a doctor, a Christian, a young man (he was born in
1961) and a mulatto. He is something of a kind apostle. He is the true New
Man, born of the revolution: a person horrified by the communist
dictatorship. His wife, Elsa Morejón, a heroine in her own right, is his
right hand. The machine has been unable to bend them.
I don't know
if Biscet will ever receive the medal. Political prisons in Cuba are ghastly.
Perhaps he'll die before freedom arrives. Former political prisoner Héctor
Palacios Ruiz has just arrived in Spain and the stories he told the press
are terrible. Héctor, 65, is a former communist, jovial and rotund. He
rubbed elbows with Che and believed implicitly in Castro's good intentions.
Until 1980, he served the apparatus in sinister and important missions and
tasks. He broke away from the party when he saw State Security-led mobs beat
people who expressed on the streets their desire to leave the country. He
was disgusted.
Little by
little, he joined the democratic opposition. In the 1990s, he founded an
independent think tank to study the incredible Cuban reality. The
authorities arrested him 20 times. Once, they put him in front of a firing
squad and “executed” him with blank cartridges to test his moral resistance.
Finally, in April 2003, along with 75 other absolutely innocent dissidents,
he was sentenced to prison. Their crimes? They asked for plural elections,
lent forbidden books and communicated with the foreign media. Like Biscet,
Palacios was given a 25-year sentence. Not long ago, because he was in very
poor health, in danger of imminent death, the Spanish government asked
Havana to release him in its care, hoping to save him.
What did they
do to him in prison? Héctor Palacios is 6 feet 3 inches tall, a corpulent
man. For two years, he was kept in a metal-and-concrete box, 5 feet 4 inches
high, 5 feet 10 inches long, and 4 feet wide. The cell, a kind of catafalque
shaped like an igloo, built by the Russians in the 1960s, sits in the yard
of a prison known as Kilo 5.5 in Pinar del Río province. It has no windows
and the Cuban sun turns it into an oven. Héctor lived semi-recumbent and in
semi-darkness. He lost 88 pounds. He breathed through the door slit. His
company were the rats and the cockroaches that emerged from the hole into
which he defecated. Eventually, he became indifferent to these vermin. In
effect, he became indifferent to life and several times he thought he had
died.
Once a day, for a few minutes, his jailers ran a water hose inside, so he
could drink and flush the unsanitary toilet hole. Héctor was able to
mentally resist, because he is a psychologist and was prepared for that
calvary. Physically, however, his organism shattered; the immobility, thirst
and bad food destroyed his circulatory system. When he left that hell, he
suffered from cardiac insufficiency and his weakened leg veins could barely
pump blood. All the valves in his return circulation were damaged. When I
saw him, I asked: “Do you think you'll pull through?” Without boasting, he
answered something else: “What's important is that they couldn't crush me.”
I didn't know what to say.
November 4, 2007
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