The last five paragraphs of Against All Hope by Armando Valladares:
The hour of my departure arrived. The procession of several cars headed down Rancho Boyeros Avenue toward Jose Marti International Airport. The plane was scheduled for seven in the evening. The setting sun dyed the afternoon pomegranate-red. My heart sent up a hymn of thanks to God, and I prayed for my family, who hadn't been allowed to come to say goodbye, and for my friends remaining behind in the eternal night of the Cuban political prisons.
As the cars sped along, a flood of memories rushed over me. Twenty-two years in jail. I recalled the two sergeants, Porfirio and Matanzas, plunging their bayonets into Ernesto Diaz Madruga's dying body; Roberto Lopez Chavez dying in a cell, calling for water, the guards urinating over his face and in his gasping mouth; Boitel, denied water too, after more than fifty days on hunger strike, because Fidel wanted him dead; Clara, Boitel's poor mother, beaten by Lieutenant Abad in a Political Police station just because she wanted to find out where her son was buried. I remembered Carrion, shot in the leg, telling Jaguey not to shoot, and Jaguey mercilessly, heartlessly, shooting him in the back; the officers who threatened family members if they cried at a funeral.
I remembered Estebita and Piri dying in blackout cells, the victims of biological experimentation; Diosdado Aquit, Chino Tan, Eddy Molina, and so many others murdered in the forced-labor fields, quarries and camps. A legion of specters, naked, crippled, hobbling and crawling through my mind, and the hundreds of men wounded and mutilated in the horrifying searches. Dynamite. Drawer cells. Edwardo Capote's fingers chopped off by a machete. Concentration camps, tortures, women beaten, soldiers pushing prisoners' heads into a lake of shit, the beatings of Eloy and Izaguirre. Martin Perez with his testicles destroyed by bullets. Roberto weeping for his mother.
And in the midst of that apocalyptic vision of the most dreadful and horrifying moments of my life, in the midst of the gray, ashy dust and the orgy of beatings and blood, prisoners beaten to the ground, a man emerged, the skeletal figure of a man wasted by hunger, with white hair, blazing blue eyes, and a heart overflowing with love, raising his arms to the invisible heaven and pleading for mercy for his executioners.
"Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do." And a burst of machine-gun fire ripping open his breast.
"In contradiction to what he always said, Fidel had in o way renounced capitalist comfort or chosen to live in austerity. On the contrary, his way of life resembled that of a capitalist, without any kind of limit. He never believed that his speeches required him to live the austere life of all self-respecting revolutionaries; nether he nor Raul ever practiced the precepts they preached to their compatriots. Which leads one to the conclusion that Fidel was extremely manipulative; with his formidable intelligence, he was capable of manipulating a person or a group of people without difficulty or scruple--in addition to which he was repetitive and obsessive. In discussions with his foreign counterparts, Fidel would repeat the say things as often as was necessary to convince them he was right." --from The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 years as Personal Boodyguard to El Lideer Maximo" by Juan Reinaldo Sanchez with Axel Gylden, 2015
ReplyDeleteSome are more equal than others.
ReplyDeleteThe world has had a number of sociopathic leaders who govern authoritatively and there will be more. Almost seems to come with the territory, i.e., a lust for power. Be a winna and a sinna!
ReplyDeleteCastro is said to have survived over 600 assassination attempts. Not even Ronnie could bring him down. We let the refugees virtually take over Miami. Ya think that would happen today?
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