Vol. 79/No. 30 August 24, 2015
The following interview with Gerardo Hernández appeared in the online publication Cubadebate on July 26, the 62nd anniversary of the opening battle of the revolutionary struggle in Cuba that led to the Jan. 1, 1959, triumph over the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
Hernández is one of the Cuban Five — revolutionaries who were arrested in 1998 and imprisoned in the United States for their activity keeping tabs on paramilitary groups in Florida that carried out violent attacks on the Cuban Revolution and its supporters. Last December the 16-year-long international campaign to free the Five succeeded — a victory for the Cuban Revolution. Hernández, Ramón Labañino, and Antonio Guerrero were released from federal prison and returned to Cuba; René González and Fernando González had been released previously after serving their entire sentences. Translation and subheadings are by the Militant.
This Sunday, Gerardo will have a second chance to experience something as though for the very first time. After more than 16 years in prison, he will once again be able to celebrate July 26 with his loved ones. But his memories remain intact, like a photo album in chronological order. It’s impossible to erase what you have lived.
On behalf of the Five, Gerardo spoke to Cubadebate about why he defends his ideas and how, in personally symbolic ways, they celebrated from afar the Cuban Revolution’s historic dates. He also spoke about how, even in prison, those who live in the United States cannot escape the manipulation in the press that Cuba is subjected to on such occasions.
In addition to the regular punishment that imprisonment implies, we faced a few additional abuses. One of them was that if we felt like watching television, we had to suffer through the same propaganda that everyone in the United States undergoes. For example, on May 20, [the Spanish-language network] Univision made a point of broadcasting its congratulations to Cuba on its Independence Day!1 And sometimes prisoners would hear that and turn around and say to me, “Hey Cuba, congratulations!”
And I’d say to them, “Don’t congratulate me today; I’m not celebrating yet!”
“But why?”
And then I’d have to explain: “Jan. 1 is when you should congratulate me!”
These were great opportunities for a history lesson, because they were congratulating me in good faith. It happened constantly: “Congratulations Cuba! Congratulations!”
On July 26, of course, the vast majority of the television channels never so much as mentioned the date, although at times on some of the English-language channels something appeared, especially if there was a very large rally in Cuba. They would refer to the date and explain a little, in very broad strokes. And I always put on my little Cuban flag, which I still have, because I was able to bring it back. In fact, quite often I wore it anyway, even if there was no historic date to celebrate. But I always wore it for our important national dates and celebrations.
Whenever I wore it, people would notice and say to me, “Hey Cuba, you’re all dressed up today!”
“No,” I’d explain, “it’s because today’s an important day.” And so that was how it was on Jan. 1, on Fidel’s birthday, on July 26 — our historic dates. This was our way of commemorating them, because there was no other way to do it.
These incidents gave us the opportunity to educate many people about these questions. Because when they saw “Congratulations to Cuba on its Independence Day,” everyone thought that for Cuba this meant May 20. They didn’t know the political background behind this disinformation.
This happened for a long time on July 26. But after a while, as the years passed, people who’d spent a long time with you already understood. And, it goes without saying, the same thing happened with the case of the Five. We always used our case as an example when we spoke with the other prisoners.
Lies about Cuba
The media also painted prerevolutionary Cuba as an earthly paradise. In response, I’d tell this story. When I was still free, I listened to Miami radio stations in order to keep tabs on Radio Martí. One day, a woman called in to one of these talk shows and said:“Oh Martha, those communists with their claims! It’s all a lie, Martha! Because I remember, Martha, we had a yacht and we lived in Miramar and we used to go down and get on the yacht and go out sailing on those lovely Cuban afternoons. And all that about people being taken prisoner and being tortured, all lies, Martha! If you knew someone in the government, they’d get you out, Martha.”
And I’d say to myself, “What this woman is saying is incredible!”
Later, when the prisoners felt comfortable with you, they’d ask, “Was that how it was? People were just sent to the firing squad?”
I had to explain the kinds of things that were found in the police stations, how they were filled with every kind of torture instrument imaginable, even things for removing eyeballs.
Nobody could conceive of such things, much less Cubans! For a young man, it’s not easy to comprehend. You need time to let it sink in. Those issues of Bohemia magazine with pictures of young people who’d been murdered — tortured and thrown into a pond with a nipple missing from their chest — and the dictatorship said they were the terrorists. That really got to me!
When you get to the U.S., where they show photos of those who were shot by firing squads and talk about those executed by Castro, by Che, they always show a famous picture of Blanco Rico, who was, I believe, chief of police. When he was shot — I remember he was wearing a white suit — Bohemia said that his last words had been, “Okay, you boys got this far. Keep going with the revolution!” And the guy was a ruthless murderer!
So they show the photo of his execution, when he falls into a pit. They show photos of men executed by “Castro’s firing squads,” but they never tell you who that man really was. When they’d show a documentary like that, I’d tell the young prisoners: “Yes, but what they don’t say is who that man really was.” And I’d tell them about all the torture devices that were found in the police stations. 2
Batista’s record of torture
Afterwards, when we received the book from Cuba containing works by various artists — Desde la soledad y la esperanza [Between Solitude and Hope] — there was a section that included those photos from Bohemia showing those instruments for removing fingernails or eyes. “Look here,” I’d say, “this is the Cuba that they want you to think was a paradise!”I think this is something we have to stress, because today, when I speak with my nephews for example, they don’t know about these photos. We have to continue to stress this, so that people know what really happened here. The cars, architecture, and music of the 1950s are in fashion today but nobody is talking about the other thing that happened here in the fifties. We have to continue to remind young people of that. If we don’t, if we let those who want to portray those years as Cuba’s golden age win the battle, we’ll be in much worse shape.
For example, in the place where I went to high school, former Police Station no. 14, I’m sure that many of the students in that school today have no clear idea of what happened there before, of how many young people were tortured in the basement where they now take shop classes. We’ve got to constantly stress that, otherwise it’s just another school, just another building. But every place has its history.
How many times do we pass by a plaque without anyone paying it the least attention. On that very street corner, a student might have been shot and killed, yet people pass by as though nothing had ever happened. That’s because we were born into a peaceful country; a country where such crimes don’t happen. And we take for granted that it was like this in the past, too.
Capitalist world of gangs, cops
The five of us spent 16 years in the company of young people from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, the United States, listening to their stories. The last cellmate I had was a young man, 24 years old, who was serving a double life sentence.“Cuba,” he told me, “what happened is that I grew up in this environment. My dad had to join the gangs in order to support my family. I grew up seeing that. One day some pickup trucks arrived at my house. They were looking for my dad but he found a place to hide. They took my uncle, and by the next morning he’d been killed.
“That divided my family forever. My grandmother never forgave my father. She said it was his fault my uncle had been killed.
“But that’s how it is,” he told me. “In that city, when you go out with your girlfriend, you have to be very careful. If you pass the wrong place and someone says to you, ‘I like that girl,’ she will be snatched from your hands. You’ll never see her again.”
I remember the first time he told me that story, I naively asked him: “But can’t you go to the police and file a complaint against them?”
After he stopped laughing at my question, he answered, “The police work for them.”
That’s a case from a Latin American country, but in the United States, it’s no different. I was sent to the maximum-security prison closest to Los Angeles. The crème de la crème of the gangs of Los Angeles end up there. They’d be your cellmates, and you’d hear the stories. They’d talk about the 37th Street gang, the 41st Street gang, Los Locos from wherever. If you crossed into the territory of one of these gangs and weren’t from there, you’d get shot.
They’ve been in that environment ever since they were born. Sometimes I’d talk with them, wondering what circumstances brought a 24-year-old to a maximum-security prison with two life sentences.
They’d say to me, “Look Cuba, the problem is that when you go to elementary school here, you have two options — either you’re in a gang or you’re abused by the gangs. It’s better to be a gang member than to be abused by a gang. And after you enter that world, one day someone puts a gun in your hand and tells you to go kill that person over there. You have to do it because if you don’t, they’ll kill you.”
Gains of revolution in daily life
When people talk about the achievements of the Revolution, Cuba’s health care and education are internationally recognized. But hardly anything is ever mentioned about the tranquility of our everyday life, the safety we enjoy here, the fact that a child can play until dawn on a street corner near his home and nothing will happen to him. That any tourist can go into the worst possible neighborhood and the worst that will happen, the very worst thing, is that they’ll have their gold chain snatched or a knife pulled on them while they’re robbed. That’s the absolute worst. But in any one of these other countries, a stray bullet could kill anyone in broad daylight. There’ve been so many cases like that!In prison, we lived in a microcosm of this world. You went into the dining room and the African-Americans were sitting on one side, certain Hispanics on another, but watch out. Don’t sit down by mistake at the table that’s not for you. If you do, you’re looking for trouble. It was that way out in the exercise yard as well. It’s a reflection of the society itself: the blacks in one neighborhood, the whites in another.
In spite of all of our problems, we have the enormous privilege of living in a society that doesn’t yet suffer from these evils and, I hope, never will. We have to do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening here. But we also have to educate young people, so that they understand this privilege we enjoy. They were born with it. The majority don’t know the other reality. They take what they have for granted. They believe it’s like this everywhere. They don’t value it. That’s why we have to constantly raise the level of consciousness.
In that sense, prison was also a tremendous school for us. As I said, we lived in a microcosm of the world outside. We got to know the problems of many places around the world, problems that, unfortunately, are common to many countries.
Battle of ideas
We’re victims of the big-business press. We’re victims of the empire’s great publicity machine, which it uses to highlight whatever it finds convenient: nonsense, banalities. It’s a constant, 24-hour bombardment, and, unfortunately, there are people who believe that this is all there is. That capitalism is a house with two cars and a swimming pool. And Haiti isn’t capitalism. Central America isn’t capitalism. The poor neighborhoods of the United States aren’t capitalism. Capitalism is whatever it suits them to show!The ideological battle is the great battle that we must take up with young people. We have to engage in that battle. If we’ve done this in other areas, how are we not going to carry it out on the ideological plane, something so extremely important, especially now. Because on the positive side, we’re probably going to see a huge influx of tourists. On the negative side, there will also be a lot of people spouting propaganda about how great things are in the U.S., or at least what they want people to believe about what it’s like there.
For our people, this commemorative date marks the victorious struggle that culminated with our tremendous triumph in 1959. We’re living through the experience of meeting fellow citizens wherever we go, as we walk through the streets, as we visit our schools, and having them tell us, “Thank you for what you did for Cuba.” But we are also conscious of the fact that we have to be grateful, too.
I think that behind this victory stand many anonymous heroes who have no set working hours: who worked so hard in the mornings, afternoons, nights, middle of the night, or even many sleepless nights, so that the Five could be here to celebrate July 26 along with our people and experience these moments of happiness.
2 Hernández was likely recalling not Antonio Blanco Rico, Batista’s head of military intelligence (killed in 1956 by Revolutionary Directorate fighters), but Col. Cornelio Rojas, chief of police in Santa Clara. Rojas was one of hundreds of torturers and murderers tried by revolutionary tribunals in 1959. “This may have been the only revolution in which the main war criminals were tried and brought to justice,” Fidel Castro told a journalist in 2006. “There were no lynchings, no bloodbaths … because of our insistence and our promise: ‘War criminals will be brought to justice and punished.’”