Posted on Sat, Mar. 22, 2008
By MANUEL VAZQUEZ PORTAL
The Committee to Protect Journalists (www.cpj.org) released a report on
the independent journalists who remain jailed. Included is an essay by
Manuel Vázquez Portal, a Cuban poet and journalist who lives in Miami.
He writes about his year in prison before being released. Below are
excerpts.
His obscene symphony reverberates in my ear. With a slap of my hand I
put an end to his fragile ferocity. Now, perhaps, he's just a
disemboweled black smudge, somewhere in the semi-darkness. Or perhaps he
escaped the blow. Either way, I've been startled awake. Sometimes it's
mosquitoes. Other times, a rat. She tears through my memory. She
threatens a sullen lizard, who runs away. She takes possession of my
space. Voracious, she consumes my food. She defecates, then moves on to
my books, the photo of my son. She devours them. She defecates. She
attacks my toothpaste and my soap, obliterating them. She defecates.
My intestines clench
At midday the lizards eat the mosquitoes. Then come the rats to eat the
lizards. I can't eat. Dinner reeks of putrefaction. My stomach rebels,
my intestines clench and scream. Scream like a hungry rat.
I try to sleep. I ascend to the whitest reaches of my soul. I climb to
the heights of my innocence. I know that I am innocent. My sin is to
love liberty, justice and beauty. I float. I'm on the verge of bliss.
But suddenly pins are piercing my nose and lungs. I sneeze. My nose
runs. I gasp for air.
The Turkish toilet has overflowed, and the excrement rises toward my
prisoner's cot. There's no water. I can't wash. I can't tidy up. It hits
me that I'm imprisoned. That my room is a prison cell measuring five
feet in width. That justice has also been held captive by my jailers.
I've no one to complain to. Perhaps the rest of the world will
sympathize with me. And then a hand gently caresses my hair, and the
voice of Yolanda becomes music, telling me that Saturday there's a party
at Gabriel's school. I smile weakly. It was only the nightmare again, I
tell myself.
But what has become my nightmare today is in fact the reality for Héctor
Maseda Gutiérrez and José Ubaldo Izquierdo, for Omar Ruíz Hernández and
Juan Carlos Herrera, for Normando Hernández González and Ricardo
González Alfonso, who still live this terror after five years in a Cuban
jail.
And I know that they are innocent. That their crime, too, is the love of
liberty, justice, and beauty. We were journalists. We sought out the
truth. And we told it. For this, the Cuban government cast us onto the
dung heap with the rats, the mosquitoes, the inedible food and the lack
of water, the filthy cellblocks and the malicious prison guards. . . .
My nightmare today is the daily suffering of Pablo Pacheco Avila and
Fabio Prieto Llorente and Julio César Gálvez Rodríguez, making Cuba the
world's second-leading jailer of journalists, with 22 thrown in prison
since March 2003.
Worse still, they have been imprisoned for five years, five years during
which the world, standing in solidarity, hasn't stopped calling for
their freedom so that they, too, can attend a party at their children's
school some Saturday.
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