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By ANTHONY DePALMA
The New York Times
June11
TORONTO --
Each stroll in the neighborhood opens new worlds for Guillermo Sambra. He gawks
at the shoes and radios in Toronto's store windows and shakes his head in
disbelief at the gleaming new cars that actually stop to let him cross the
street.
Until recently, Sambra's world was limited to one cockroach-infested Cuban
prison cell where he was serving an eight-year sentence for the crime of
distributing election material.
After five years and four months in jail, Sambra, now 27, was suddenly told
that he was being released. One day last month, he was put on a jet along with
his wife and daughter and sent to Canada to begin life again. In all, 17 Cuban
dissidents have been exiled to Canada since Pope John Paul II urged Fidel Castro
early this year to throw open the doors of his prisons.
"I feel like a newborn," said Sambra, a slightly built young man
with hollow cheeks, dark sunken eyes and a pain in his stomach that developed in
prison and is a constant reminder of his time there. He arrived in Toronto with
little more than the clothes on his back. "When the plane left Cuba I felt
as if a great weight had dropped off of me."
Canada is a land of immigrants and that is especially true of Toronto, which
is peopled by so many newcomers from so many different parts of the world that
at times it feels more like an international airport terminal than a city.
But few immigrants arrive here with such a depth of disbelief as Sambra and
the other Cubans. For them, not only is the richness of North America
staggering, but also its very existence represents a challenge to lifelong ways
of thinking.
Since he landed at Toronto's Pearson International Airport, Sambra said he
had learned that contrary to what was drilled into him at home in Santiago, the
island's second most important city, communist Cuba is not the only place with
universal medical care.
"You don't have to pay anything here," said Sambra, who has had
free medical exams since he arrived. "I thought that the only country in
the world where that happened was Cuba." He and his wife, Miriam, and their
daughter, Jessica, have been given landed immigrant status in Canada, which
automatically entitles them to all the benefits of Canadian citizenship, without
allowing them to vote. They can apply for citizenship in three years.
Sambra's euphoria may be tempered when he finds himself paying Canada's high
taxes or suffering through a northern winter. But for now even the simplest
aspect of life takes on great significance. The cars that stop at crosswalks
have quickly become his favorite symbol of Canada, a land, he said, where even
powerful machines can be stopped by the individual rights of ordinary people.
"The automobile has the force, it's made of steel and the people are
just flesh and bones," he said. In Cuba, drivers lean on their horns when
approaching pedestrians, expecting them to give way. "But here," he
said, "the person has the right to go first."
Although he was jailed on charges of rebellion, Sambra considers himself an
unlikely rebel. Before he was imprisoned in 1993, he had lived his entire life
in his grandfather's house. He had not gone beyond the 10th grade and his only
dream was to pick up his grandfather's trade, keeping old American-made,
pre-revolution General Electric, Westinghouse and Philco refrigerators running
as long as possible.
He said the communist newspapers in Cuba never tired of publishing articles
about how bad things were in the United States and, it sometimes seemed, every
country but Cuba.
"Every place seemed to be so bad that you figured you might as well
stay in Cuba," he said.
But despite the isolation and misinformation, the never-ending shortages of
food and clothing made him suspect that what the newspapers said could not be
true. His dissatisfaction gnawed at him.
His mother and father had divorced long ago but he knew his father, Ismael,
was an important writer and television producer, who also felt cheated by life
in Cuba. When the elder Sambra began distributing anti-government campaign
literature before the 1992-1993 local and national elections, Guillermo did so
too.
The offending words on the pamphlets he slipped under doors were simple:
liberty, dignity, independence. The underlying message was a direct challenge to
Castro's old chant of "Socialism or death."
"We said, 'No socialism. No death. No Castro,"' the younger Sambra
said.
Early one morning, five armed policemen came for Guillermo Sambra. They
hauled him in for questioning. Eventually he was transferred to a grim state
prison that baked during the day and swarmed with insects at night. Clouds of
mosquitoes filled the cell and constant dampness attracted roaches.
A month after Guillermo was arrested, police came back for his father. Both
were eventually found guilty of rebellion. Guillermo was sentenced to eight
years. His father got 10 years.
The Canadian chapter of PEN, the international writer's group, began a
campaign to free the elder Sambra, which was furthered by the Canadian
government. Canada ignores the U.S. embargo and maintains diplomatic and
commercial relations with Cuba. In the last two years, Canadian officials have
moved to strengthen those ties while pushing the Cubans to improve their record
on human rights.
Ismael Sambra was freed from prison just over a year ago and exiled to
Canada, where he has taken up the post of scholar in residence at York
University in Toronto.
Life in Canada for the elder Sambra has also been an adventure. After
learning to write on a computer, he has done substantial work on a book about
Cuba. He also used his e-mail to campaign for the release of his son.
He was disappointed when Guillermo was not among the first batch of
prisoners to be freed after the pope's visit, but elated to learn he would be in
the second group.
Guillermo and his family spent their first weeks in Canada at a nonprofit
immigration center in West Toronto called Costi, which arranges government
assistance and helps provide food, clothing and housing subsidies for a year, or
until Guillermo finds work. He has already moved into his own apartment, not far
from his father.
Both father and son find it difficult to describe how they feel about being
forced to leave Cuba and take up residence in Canada. But both are equally
struck by what they say are the walls built around Cuba during the last 40 years
that made the rest of the world seem so forbidding.
"Rights for workers, liberty of expression, social benefits, free
health care, education, children's parks -- all that Fidel promised was going to
happen has happened here in Canada," Ismael Sambra said. "Once I told
a friend in jest, 'Hey, this is communism. This is what they told us it was
going to be like in Cuba.' So for what did we shed so much blood in Cuba? Why
did we go through such anguish?"
Thursday, June 11, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times |