The months that followed the dissolution of the Cooperadoras Diocesanas were very stressful and difficult to me. Suddenly my life and future as a consecrated lay woman within the Catholic Church in Cuba were destroyed. I felt emotionally devastated. It was not only going continually back and forth with memories and regrets of those nine years, but also struggling to find a new meaning and a purpose to my life. A Spanish Capuchin priest who walked with me during the last three years of the community suggested the possibility of exploring new avenues to continue my life as a religious woman, just “to save my vocation.” I was unable to follow, through his recommendation; I was not even ready to make sense of my present, so how I was going to think about the future?
One of the people associated with our apostolic work helped me to find a job at the Psychiatric Hospital of Mazorra. In the month of July I started to work as Assistant of Diagnostic and Treatment and was assigned to a new project by the director of the hospital, Comandante Bernabé Ordaz (a position that he carried out for over four decades). For years the chronically ill patients were within wards taking medications, walking the area, and sleeping. The new plan was called Ergotherapy and defined as “any activity that can be constructively used in helping patients regain their general abilities, and, through them, their place in society.”
My work at the Ergotherapy section of the hospital was to design what type of intervention was more suitable to each one of the patients assigned to the program—at that moment there were only three forms of interventions: manual activities, sports, and arts (mostly drawings). My decision of what to whom was based on the review of the patient’s clinical chart. Some very elemental diagnostic tests were also applied. Periodically I was responsible for doing some analysis and comparisons of the products of patient’s activity.
My work in the hospital also included the basic psychiatric evaluations for the diagnosis of outpatients that were attending the clinic within the hospital. I had the opportunity to learn and apply different techniques to assess achievement, aptitudes, emotional disturbances, and psychiatric difficulties. One of the psychiatrists for whom I did diagnostic work invited me to do voluntary work in the Sanatorio San Juan de Dios, at Los Pinos.
Having the opportunity to work at the Sanatorio was a unique and authentic enrichment experience. The Sanatorio was serviced by the brothers of San Juan de Dios and followed the saint’s spirituality. San Juan de Dios was born in Portugal in 1495 and died in Granada, Spain, in 1550. He founded the hospital order and is the universal patron of hospitals, doctors, nurses, and all the unhealthy. The Sanatorio had inpatient and outpatient services. The director and the other friars knew who I was but never made any comment to me regarding the past. On the contrary, they really embraced and helped me recover from my spiritual and psychological wounds. Soon I resigned my job at the Psychiatric Hospital and dedicated myself to work only with the friars in the Sanatorio. There I met my husband, José Marquez Quesada.
We met on February 11, 1971. A common friend who was working in the Sanatorio told me about him in these terms: Pepe was imprisoned for ten years and is a “buena persona”. At that moment my experience regarding the Presidio Politico Cubano was reduced to what I learned through the wives and other relatives of political prisoners. Like many other Cubans that were near the families of political prisoners, we helped them to prepare “la jaba “when they had the opportunity to visit them, we consoled them when they came back devastated with the experience, and we prayed with them asking God for their consolation and for the strength of the prisoners.
Today, these three terms are used indistinctly to signify more or less the same concept. First, dissident. The term dissident was first time used in the Soviet Union during the period of 1965–1985. Citizens who criticized the practices or the authority of the Communist Party were called “dissidents.” The people who used to write and distribute uncensored, nonconformist literature were criticized in the official newspapers as dissidents. Soon many of those who were dissatisfied with the Soviet Bloc began to self-identify as dissidents. Second, prisoner of conscience. Prisoner of conscience (POC) is a term coined by the human rights group Amnesty International in the early 1960s. It can refer to anyone imprisoned because of his or her race, religion, color, language, sexual orientation, belief or lifestyle, so long as the person has not used or advocated violence. It also refers to those who have been imprisoned and/or persecuted for the nonviolent expression of their conscientiously held beliefs. Finally, political prisoner. Political prisoner includes people who are imprisoned because they are awaiting trial for, or have been convicted of, actions against the government they oppose. The actions of political prisoners are considered morally justified. In my eyes, Pepe was not only a political prisoner but also a prisoner of conscience, and a political dissident.
There are books and reports written about the political prison in Cuba during the two first decades of the revolution. Pepe belonged to the Historic Generation of Political Prisoners. What is called “the historic prison” of Castro’s era started from the early days of the triumph of the revolution. The first to be condemned were the military officers of the former regime. The “historical prisoners” were strengthened starting in the days just before the Bay of Pigs invasion, which took place in April 1961. It has been estimated that more than 100,000 people went to jail during those days. One of the attitudes that turned the first prisoners into historical prisoners, aside from the time during which they were jailed, was their refusal to wear the blue uniform of common prisoners. This cost them violent confrontations and physical and psychological tortures, and they finally ended almost naked, only wearing their underwear, for many years. I found the best description of this period in the book Nobody Listened by Armando Valladares. On its very first page it says, “Man is a marvel of nature. To torture him, destroy him, ban him for his ideas is, more than a violation of human rights, a crime against all humanity.”
However, Pepe never presented himself as a hero but as a person whose actions were the logical conclusion of his principles, his beliefs, and his conscience. Pepe was and has been always very hesitant to talk about his time in prison. Most of what I have learned regarding Pepe’s behavior during those years was through the testimonies related by his fellow ex-political prisoners. Pepe didn’t go to jail because he was link or belonged to any big anti-Castro political movement but he went to jail as part of small attempts to interrupt the functioning and the establishment of the regime.
Pepe was sentenced when he was nineteen years. He was sentenced to ten years in prison and he fulfilled the time of his sentence without taking or using any type of privileges in exchange for giving up his principles. Just as a comparison, when our son had that same age he moved to live in college, and had the opportunity to live as any other young man full of ideals and dreams for himself, for his family, and for his country.
Here is Pepe’s prison chronology: After being sentenced, he spent a few months in la Cabaña. Just a month after his twentieth birthday he was taken in a military plane to Nueva Gerona and from there he was transferred to the Presidio Modelo de Isla de Pinos. There he spent five years as the political prisoner number 27549. Then, he returned back to La Cabaña. Later he was moved to Granja Sandino, in the extreme west of Cuba, in the province of Pinar del Rio, for seven to eight months, then back to Galera 23 in La Cabaña and later for the rest of his term he was at Granja Melena 1 in Habana Campo, which was a new administrative decision done by the Cuban government in the 1960s.
Both el Morro and la Cabaña are important monuments of Cuban’s history and symbols of Habana and Cuba. They are “musts” for every visitor who wants to enjoy nice views of Habana and learn more about Cuban and Habana history. El Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro and La Fortaleza San Carlos de la Cabaña are located across the Bay of Habana. Both buildings have very painful histories due to what happened inside their walls since 1959.
The Presidio Modelo was built on Isla de Pinos, under president-turned-dictator Gerardo Machado between 1926 and 1928. The five circulars were built with the capacity to humanely house up to 2,500 prisoners. Most of the survivors of the rebel attacks on Moncada Barracks, including attack leader Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl Castro, were imprisoned there, most from 1953 to 1955. After Fidel Castro’s revolutionary triumph in 1959, Presidio Modelo was used to jail political dissidents, counterrevolutionaries, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and anyone else considered unfit or an enemy to the new norms and dictates of the Socialist Cuban state. The government in 1966 permanently closed it.
The ten years of emotional repression, the injustices witnessed and experienced, the feelings of indignation and impotence all left a mark on my husband’s life. One of the images used by José Marti is that the country is like an altar and not a pedestal to stand on (la Patria es ara no pedestal). I like to say that Pepe deposited in the altar of his country his whole life—his physical, psychological, social, and spiritual life—and this “offertory” had consequences for his psychosocial and personal life.
It is known that adaptation and mental health are inseparable concepts. Pepe developed adaptive strategies to survive the ten years he spent in prison, but in May 1970, the environment where he was going to live now was totally different from the one he left ten years before. The street was the same as well as the number in the door of his house, but the socio-cultural environment had dramatically changed. So, abruptly he had no adaptive strategies to survive. He needed to learn or to create them.
We learned that we couldn’t judge or understand a person unless we understand the society in which the person lives. In the Cuba that followed 1959, when a person suffers from physical illness it was easy to hang out with him, to be his friend, to give support, and to accompany him throughout his process of healing; when a person has economic difficulties it can also be handled easily by his friends and family members—it is a problem of luck and “a cualquiera le puede tocar“ (anyone can be in that situation). However, when a person was imprisoned because challenges the highly politicized, repressive and fearful environment, that person had to endure all type of rejections—like being walking on his own block and seeing his neighbors changing their path so they don’t have to face him, or looking to other direction so they don’t have to return a salutation, “just in case someone could judge the encounter as a sign of sympathy with him.” The community isolates the political prisoner—the political prisoner’s sentence to jail doesn’t finish when the time term is done. The sentence continues in the big prison of the Cuban island.
The ability to control one’s own life is an important element in psychological health. Cubans cannot see themselves as controlling their own destiny, cannot have power and some capacity for deciding what happens to them, moreover cannot use their capacity for deciding what happens to them. Pepe, as many other Cubans who exited jail or who were openly defiant and/or opposed to the government, was unable to control his own destiny. For example, when Pepe was released from jail, he had all the requirements to travel outside Cuba. However, just a few days before, on May 1, 1970, the Cuban government decided to close indefinitely the exit of Cubans to the exterior. So all the efforts done by his older brother to obtain a visa for him travel to Mexico were wasted. The visa was there, but his authorization to leave Cuba was rejected. That situation was very traumatic for Pepe: no matter that for ten years he paid the consequences of being against the government, now he has to continue paying the price. Now he must adapt to the society from which he was totally alienated for ten years. He was obligated to change his assumptions for his future, change his inner hopes to recoup his life.
My husband exhibited and exhibits characteristics and symptoms associated with a psychiatric disorder that is not always well understood. It is the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and is defined as a natural emotional reaction to a deeply shocking and disturbing experience. I want to emphasize that this disorder must be understood as a normal reaction to an abnormal situation, such as people who suffered a threat to life (e.g., combat veterans, especially from Vietnam, victims of accident, disasters, and acts of violence, and prisoners of war). Those who don’t know, understand or accept the features of this disorder tend to alienate or isolate the person that exhibits it.
I didn’t remember the exact day that we moved from being friends to being good friends, and to becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. These stages moved slowly until one moment when we realized that it was time to make a crucial decision concerning our future together. It was a decision that was going to change my definition of self, a decision that would tie us into a lifelong commitment of love and joy, but also of pain, suffering, and difficulties.
We got married on October 20, 1971, just eight months after we met.
Our friends helped us to have an unforgettable day, from the civil ceremony early in the morning to the religious ceremony at 5:00pm in the small chapel of Our Lady of Rosary, and ending up with a brindis (toast) at home. There were flowers: white gladiolus. There was a chorus: my friends from the San Salvador Parish put together meaningful religious songs under the direction of Ada María Rabelo. Family members of both sides, friends of both families, peers of Pepe from jail, friends from my nine years of lay minister in different parishes—everyone that was there was meant to be there. A few priests that knew me throughout my last decade went to be with us, as well as the friars and personnel of Sanatorio San Juan de Dios. More meaningful to me was the attendance of former members of the Cooperadoras Diocesanas, some of them traveled during the night from Las Villas and Camaguey just to be there for the religious ceremony.
We had a very beautiful honeymoon. I love the etymology of the word honeymoon. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary reports the etymology as from “the idea that the first month of marriage is the sweetest.” Even the Bible has a reference to the honeymoon. In Deuteronomy 24:5 we read, “When a man is newlywed, he need not go out on a military expedition, nor shall any public duty be imposed on him. He shall be exempt for one year for the sake of his family, to bring joy to the wife he has married.” And we did that.
Thanks to the good heart of a former client, we were able to spend one week in Varadero as our special luna de miel. Varadero is a resort town in the province of Matanzas, Cuba. Varadero is also called Playa Azul, which means “Blue Beach” in Spanish. We stayed in Villas Kawama Resort. With the atmosphere of a traditional hacienda, the resort is made up of a collection of attractive buildings and gardens. And right there is the beach.
Relating to another person involves the dimensions of caring, loving, and giving. Our honeymoon helped us to build up our compatibility when we put together our personal agendas to become a common agenda, when we agreed to the directions that our marriage would take, and with the way each one of us would behave in the future. Our honeymoon planted the seed of our major gift to each other for the rest of our lives: a significant, loving and meaningful friendship. We like taking care for each other, and we like to spend time with each other.
We went back to Varadero on three other occasions. During the month of September 1972, again thanks to Rina, we spent a week in Kawama. We went to celebrate our first year of marriage and with the purpose of “working hard” to make our first child. Apparently, we succeeded because nine months later Pepito was born. We went back on the summer of 1979. At that moment we were preparing ourselves to leave Cuba and we wanted to show Varadero to Pepito and to reenact our moments of happiness and joy together. Finally, a year ago, in June 2009, after twenty-nine years living in exile, and thirty-eight years of marriage we went back to Cuba.
On the 2009’s trip, purposely, we visited all the places linked to our lives: where we used to live, where we met, where we spent the first two days of our honeymoon in Habana, the place where we made the decision of leaving Cuba. We went back to Varadero and rented four nights at Kawama Motel. There we ate at the same restaurant where we ate years ago. We felt the warm blue water, the smell of the humid sand. This time, when we took the car back to Habana, I didn’t look back. It was not needed because one very important part of my cycle was completed.
The first years of marriage require from both members of the couple some radical personal adjustments. Now it is not only living your life but also sharing your life with another person. A person that until then you only knew superficially. Hans Christian Anderson wrote, “Just living together is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.” Regretfully, we lived in such difficult circumstances that it was very difficult to have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
The success during the early stages of marriage includes the establishment of a family unit apart from the families of origin. Thus, every newlywed couple needs some source of space to spend time together, to develop a sense of togetherness, a real intimacy. The scarcity of apartments or houses to initiate the marital life in Cuba was and is a crucial situation. In Cuba newlyweds have to live with their parents, or with some relative, or with some friend, live in an assigned room or dividing the living room or any other big room with a curtain or with a piece of wood so the couple has some space just for themselves.
After marriage, we went to live in a bedroom at my parents’ house for two years. During that period my father died and when I was near to delivering our son there was a rumor that the government was going to allow the political prisoners to leave Cuba. So we moved to a smaller room in my in-laws house where Pepe had his Libreta de Abastecimiento. Cuban families rely for their food intake on the Libreta de Abastecimiento (Supplies Booklet) distribution system, which was instated on March 12, 1962. The system established the rations each person is allowed to buy through the system, and the frequency of supplies. Products included in the libreta vary according to age and gender. Granting a special diet requires presentation of a medical certificate that confirms the health condition and what product requirements this condition has. At the same time, the Libreta de Abastecimiento is and was your proof of residency.
After moving our clothes (and memories) from my mother’s house to my in-laws’ house we discovered that it was only a rumor. I guess that I must write a little about rumors in Cuba. A rumor is defined as “an unverified account or explanation of events circulating from person to person and pertaining to an object, event, or issue in public concern.” Rumors are also often discussed with regard to misinformation and disinformation. In Cuba, doesn’t exist free press. There are only two official newspapers: Granma and Juventud Rebelde. On it you could find only articles of the different figures of the Communist government and the “official” political interpretation of reality; there were a few official radio stations with the same pattern of actions. The day-to-day events, dreams, rumors, and gossip are transmitted person to person in a totally informal way. You could open the communication with the line “What is new?” (¿Qué hay de nuevo?) And the other one answers with what he just learned, or listened, or maybe was thinking about. Or maybe what he had just analyzed during the last night (one characteristic of Cubans is how well trained we are to discuss politics). This is what is called radio Bemba (lips radio station), the most reliable source of information in Cuba.
We, as a family, had a period of privacy that lasted a few months when a friend of Pepe, also a former political prisoner, allowed us to move to an empty house that belonged to a member of his family. But when we started to get the feeling of togetherness we needed to return to Pepe’s parents’ house.
In 1978, we understood that there was no chance to leave Cuba so we intended another avenue to find a place to live by ourselves. At that moment, I was just two semesters away from receiving my degree as Licentiate in clinical psychology. I went to talk to the director of the Policlinic of Alquizar, a little town in Habana campo, and offered myself to work there as clinical psychologist in exchange for a place to live there. The municipality of Alquízar is one of the twenty-six municipalities in the province of Habana, Cuba. It is located at the extreme southwest of the province of Habana. Both lines of Pepe’s families—maternal and paternal—were born and raised in Alquizar. Thus, Pepe had uncles and cousins living in Alquizar. Through them, Pepe asked to work in the department of accounting of a textile mill. He also requested in exchange, to provide us with a two-bedroom apartment within one of the buildings being constructed for the people that work in the Ariguanabo Textile Factory. In a sign of commitment with the factory, Pepe started to work there, going every day back and forth from Marianao, where the house of his parents was located, to Alquizar. A few weeks after he started to work, the administration of the factory assigned us the apartment. While I finished the semester and we found some furniture for the house, we continued living in Pepe’s parents’ house and spending the weekends in Alquizar.