Vanessa Bauza. Sun-Sentinel.
Published June 24, 2001
HAVANA · From behind the high walls and barbed-wire fences of Cuba's
prisons come notes written on onionskin paper, folded into small squares and
smuggled out in the mouths of relatives who are allowed to visit.
Political prisoners call them bullets because of the shape of the pleated
paper when it is tied up with string and sealed in plastic, using a match or
lighter.
Some bullets hold declarations of love or bitter verses fueled by seclusion
and pent-up rage. Others are cries for help scribbled until there is no more
white space. Unfold the page and hear the voice behind it.
In many cases a bullet is passed from a prisoner's family to one or more
dissidents until it ends up in the hands of Aida Valdés Santana, a former
political prisoner herself, who has collected the thin pages for more than 30
years and hopes to turn them into a book.
Valdés Santana is president of the National Coordinating Group of
Political Prisoners and Former Political Prisoners. Using information gathered
from an island-wide network of members, Valdés Santana keeps rosters of
prisoners' names, their sentences and the prisons they are living in -- no small
feat considering this information is generally confidential and trials are
usually closed.
She said she receives about a dozen bullets a month and files many in
folders in her central Havana apartment. But most are stashed in several safe
houses throughout the city.
"This is part of our history," Valdés Santana, 62, said. "None
of these documents can be forgotten so we don't repeat our mistakes. The people
who have signed these letters, some have left [the island], others have died. It
is the suffering of peaceful pro-democracy fighters."
One note from the Combinado del Este prison, written after a visit by United
Nations officials in 1988, describes suffocating conditions on Death Row:
They are repairing the "rectangle of death." Covering the doors
with steel sheets and substituting the little beds with three person bunk beds
and closing the windows that were made during the human rights visit [of the
U.N.].
Another note from a woman's prison outside Havana describes the poor food:
The food of the prisoners is terrible. The rice is uncooked and has worms
and the pea soup is totally raw. Our ration is eight or nine spoonfuls.
A third written in 1989 was addressed to George Bush Sr.:
There is agony in the streets with no freedom. ... Under the boot of
communist totalitarianism there is not even peace in the cemeteries.
This month Valdés Santana organized an exhibit of the letters and
photographs of political prisoners in her apartment for the foreign press. She
took it down after a day, fearing state security would confiscate the documents.
"Our fear was that the documents would disappear," she said. "To
us, they are very valuable. People risk themselves for these."
Generally, only relatives are allowed to visit prisoners, and sometimes they
are strip-searched on the way in and out. Valdés Santana said the bullets
are smuggled out in people's mouths, the folds of their clothes or "wherever
else they can be hidden."
The Cuban government considers dissidents counterrevolutionaries financed by
the United States. It does not acknowledge any political prisoners and claims
that those jailed are common criminals.
The federal government helps finance several anti-Castro groups in the
United States. Some of that money is in turn used to fund dissidents in Cuba.
Valdés Santana says there are 226 prisoners of conscience on the
island, jailed for offenses including enemy propaganda, disrespect and
dangerousness. Another 194 were jailed after attempting to leave the country
illegally. Valdés Santana considers them political prisoners too, saying
their attempts to flee were politically motivated.
In a report in May, Amnesty International said several hundred Cubans were
in jail for political reasons.
Most recently a union activist, José Orlando González Bridón,
was sentenced to two years in jail for "spreading false news" in an
Internet article he wrote last year criticizing local police.
Though she has never met most of them, Valdés Santana refers to the
political prisoners as her brothers and sisters. She has been jailed five times
for a total of 10 years on charges such as subversion and ideological deviation.
Like many other dissidents, she once believed in Fidel Castro's revolution.
In her student days at the University of Havana she protested against dictator
Fulgencio Batista. But she soon grew disillusioned. "We fought for
democracy," she said. "In 1962 Cuba took the path toward a
totalitarian Communist party. Again we found ourselves fighting against the
system... a system which tricked and betrayed us."
Vanessa Bauza can be reached at vmbauza1@yahoo.com
Copyright © 2001, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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