The dissidents speak

Recently freed from a Cuban prison, political dissident Ricardo González Alfonso describes the conditions faced during his incarceration:

They say prison is a school, and it’s true. I did my best to be a good student and kept back my tears. I succeeded so well that my prison companions still think me a brave man. 

Within a few months I could find my way pretty well around the labyrinths of shipwrecked souls. I learned the secrets and legends of killers for hire, crimes of passion, traffickers in illicit powdery substances, would-be emigrants whose clandestine departures had been no secret to the state — even thieves who’d share their teaspoon of sugar on days of hunger. 

Zoology was one class we had every day. I learned to live with rats, and even came, on certain nights of our tropical winter (which is winter, nevertheless) to stare at them with an urgency not unlike what people call appetite. I was a solitary friend to the deft spiders that sometimes freed me from the torturous buzzings and blood-shedding bites that accompanied my insomnia. 

I became well versed in cosmic solitude and silence. I remember being in a cell no wider than a man with outstretched arms. I also grew familiar with fetid overcrowding and unceasing clamor. Months of unending darkness, months of eternal light. 

Fellow released political prisoner Normando Hernandez Gonzalez describes a similar hellish existence:

 “The first month I spent in jail, I only ate eight times because the food they gave us was subhuman and so rotten that if you offered it to a dog, he’d turn away,” Gonzalez recalled. “For refusing to wear prison overalls, I was sent to a dark cell for 101 days without seeing the light of day. There wasn’t a single inch of my skin that wasn’t covered in septic mosquito bites. I was forced to sleep on the concrete floor with rats and cockroaches crawling over me.”

A sober reminder of both our own freedoms and that there are other prisons besides Guantanamo on the island.