The Double Life of Fidel Castro (29 page)

It was painful. I had spent twenty-six years in service of the
Comandante
, since 1968, seventeen of them within his escort, and it was difficult to turn the page all at once, just like that. That was when the head of the escort made his proposition: “Listen,” he said to me, “take two weeks’ vacation to think about a posting within MININT that could suit you and come back to see me.” But as I thought about it all on the way home, I began to say to myself that it was perhaps time for me to leave the profession. I was forty-five, I had achieved a sort of professional peak and traveled all over the world. In short, I knew I would not go any higher. So why not retire? In the military, one can take retirement very early.

When I got home, I told my wife my intentions and I wrote to the Cuban social security to make a pension claim. Two weeks later, I wrote my resignation letter, which initially seemed to have been accepted. Soon, however, Gen. Humberto Francis Pardo, boss of Personal Security—the department in charge of the protection of all dignitaries—summoned me to tell me that my leaving was out of the question: “You’re not going anywhere and certainly not retiring!” Sure of my rights, my total loyalty to the Revolution, and the excellence of the service I had given, I stood up to him by demanding to go through a
conducto reglamentario
(an appeal system allowing one to go over someone’s head to their superior) so as to speak directly to Furry, the minister of the interior. I did not have the slightest intention of criticizing the system but wanted only to explain to him my desire to return to civilian life.

Two days later, two lieutenant colonels came knocking at my door to announce that General Francis wanted to see me in his office again. So I immediately got in my car and drove to answer his summons. When I got there, General Francis in person gave me the order to get into another vehicle, which was going to take me “somewhere” where we could talk quietly. No sooner had I got into the white Lada than two guards sat one each side of me on the backseat. Then Colonel Laudelio, from Military Counterintelligence (a department in charge of surveillance of all Cuban military), got into the front and told me we were going to the detention center in Havana. Things were not looking good. . . . Known as Cien y Aldabó, after the names of the streets where it was located, this center is the most terrible and the most feared in Cuba: it is there that the police interrogate detainees under civil law, by beating and torturing them, and inflicting every kind of mistreatment.

From the nervous demeanor of my two guardians, I immediately realized I was in an extremely difficult situation. But I did not imagine that the problem was me. I thought that a member of my family or a friend had committed a crime. However, once we got there, Laudelio threw at me, “Okay, Sánchez, you’re an intelligent guy, you don’t need three hours of explanation: you are here as a prisoner!”

With that, I exploded. “What am I accused of ?”

“Control yourself. We’ll explain all that to you tomorrow.” “But why am I here?” I insisted.

They took off my belt, removed my shoelaces, and threw me in a cell for twenty-four hours, without warning my wife, who was worried sick when I did not come back.

The following day, they “explained” to me that I was a “traitor to the homeland” and that corroborating evidence proved that I was preparing to leave Cuba. Which was completely untrue: such an idea had never even crossed my mind.

Then, the interrogations began. That was when I discovered that, contrary to what Fidel Castro had always declared, they practice torture in Cuba—as in all the Latin American dictatorships that preceded ours, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and so on.

Carried out by Military Counterintelligence men wearing heavy overcoats, the interrogation took place in a little room in which the air-conditioning was running full blast while I, like all the prisoners of Cien y Aldabó, was wearing only a sleeveless T-shirt. The cold seared my chest and face; when I asked my persecutors if it was possible to lower the air-conditioning, they replied in mocking tones that they were really sorry, but they didn’t have access to the controls, which were outside the room. Then they left me alone for three or four hours, until my nails and lips were blue.

They spent a week trying to get me to confess that I was a counter-revolutionary, doubtless thinking that I would finally crack and sign a statement. But I was so shocked by what had happened to me that I signed nothing. One of the interrogators said to me, “You must know that you are here by order of Fidel?” And after a week he told me that the prison authorities were now awaiting the orders of the
Comandante
to know whether I could be freed or not. I was there by the express wish of the man whom I had served for quarter of a century!

At that moment, I would have liked to have been able to speak directly to my former boss, because I knew it would have been easy to show him I was an innocent victim of a setup and that he was on the wrong track. And that he had probably been misled about me by the malice of certain members of the escort. I had not forgotten that our boss José Delgado was secretly jealous of me—for the good and simple reason that he was himself talentless. In addition, my responsibility as physical trainer of the group gave me considerable power within it since it was I who selected those who would go on foreign trips.

Whatever the case, I never got to see Fidel—which shows, yet again, that he treats human beings like so much detritus the moment they are no longer useful to him. I knew that, but like many people in that situation, I thought that given all I had done for him, I would be spared.

I was then placed in isolation in an unspeakably squalid cell in which I did not see the light of day for two months. In Cien y Aldabó, the cockroach-infested cells are designed to stink of urine and excrement; there is nothing but a hole in which to relieve oneself while the water tap, giving the equivalent of two glasses of water a day, was just four inches away from this disgusting latrine. So as to break my inner biological clock, breakfast was served at two p.m. and the main meal (revolting, cold, and inadequate) at eight in the morning. In addition, it was stiflingly hot and the contrast with the interrogation room was unbearable. To complete this sordid picture, my warders brought me a visibly infected mattress made of rice straw, and after several days my skin had broken out into a spectacular rash, with pus-filled spots all over the lower half of my body, including my testicles.

Fortunately, a CIMEQ doctor, a certain Alfredo who had been imprisoned for leaving Cuba illegally, worked in the prison infirmary and managed to treat me. After two months, however, I was physically broken and emotionally destroyed, having lost almost 65 pounds, going from 183 to 119 pounds. Unable to take any more, I finally asked to speak to someone in authority and the next day was taken to see a colonel (I never knew his name) who said he knew who I was. “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time!” he declared. To which I bitterly replied that he knew where to find me. Then I presented him with an ultimatum.

“If you haven’t got me out of that rat hole by tomorrow, I am going to begin a hunger strike and I’ll have the first person who comes into my cell. . . .”

The colonel was visibly upset. He took my threat seriously. Apparently, the message went as far as Fidel for, the following day, twelve armed men were sent to come and get me and take me to the prison of La Condesa, in the town of Güines, eighteen miles south of Havana.

Being transferred to Güines represented slight progress, even if “white torture” (that left no marks) was also common practice. There, I was imprisoned with twenty-two others, many of them dangerous criminals, in what is called in Cuba a
galera
, since its conditions do indeed resemble those of a galley ship.

Güines had its own microclimate, which meant that at night, the temperature fell markedly below the average of other Cuban towns. In winter the warders took us out into the courtyard at three in the morning and made us undress. We had to stand there, naked, facing our jailers, who humiliated us: “Are you cold? That’s strange . . . we’re not!” Then those sadists burst into laughter while we prisoners shivered in the night. These kinds of practices and other, far worse, affronts were habitual in prisons on the island, and had been for decades. But that never stopped Fidel and Raúl Castro from declaring to the world that torture did not exist in Cuba, that their government was too civilized for that. . . .

In Güines, my jailers continued to threaten me: “If you deny having carried out counter-revolutionary activities and mixing with deviants, if you don’t sign the statement we give you, you will never get out of here. . . .”

Gritting my teeth and looking them in the eyes, I replied, “If that’s my destiny . . .”

Finally, about a month after my transfer, eight men who were armed to the teeth took me before the military court of Playa, a municipality in Havana. During my hearing, behind closed doors, all my rights were flouted: the president did not listen when my lawyer spoke, the prosecution witnesses were allowed to speak to each other in the adjoining room, and so on. In a supreme outrage, I saw certain of my former colleagues lining up to accuse me of counter-revolutionary deviance. However, thanks to what I knew of penal law and also because my work record was completely clean, I nonetheless managed to make a case with convincing arguments in my own defense, reminding the judges that I should not be appearing before them, and even less be in prison, because my only fault was to have asked to retire—which, I knew, did not constitute any form of crime.

The prosecutor asked for eight years of imprisonment. Several days later, my wife came to tell me the verdict: two and a half years in prison. She was relieved, for it was much less than the eight she was expecting—but I was shocked and disgusted. I appealed the sentence. The following month, the military court in the municipality of Diez de Octubre, Havana, reduced my sentence on appeal to two years’ imprisonment.

In La Condesa, I received a visit from the former head of the escort Domingo Mainet, who, at the end of the 1980s, had been appointed inspector of prisons in the province of Havana. Now each of us were, literally and metaphorically, on either side of a barrier. Mainet asked me how things were going and I replied, “Very badly. And you know perfectly well I shouldn’t be here because you know me very well.” Afterward, he asked if I thought I was in prison through Fidel’s personal wish— obviously, I refrained from telling the truth, for I knew the Cuban system and that attacking the
Comandante
would only have made things worse for me. So I contented myself with replying, “He was probably misled by your successor as head of escort, José Delgado, and by the people of Military Counterintelligence.” And I added, “Now, if you haven’t got anything else to say to me, I’d like to return to my cell.”

Another time, it was General Francis, the supreme head of Personal Security, who came to see me. When I went into the office of the prison governor—who had never before been visited by such an important general—a buffet had been laid out. Francis began by saying to me that I would soon be seen by the minister of the interior, Abelardo Colomé Ibarra . . . which never happened. Then he invited me to eat. I refused pointblank, explaining that it wasn’t the kind of meal we usually ate and that, as he certainly knew, there was no valid reason for me to be rotting in prison. The general, a little shamefaced, lowered his head and gulped, and I put an end to the conversation by asking, as I had done with Domingo Mainet, to return to my cell. Once again, I refrained from all criticism of Fidel, so as not to compromise my chances of being released.

I am also certain that attempts were made on my life during my time behind bars—in the same way that, doubtless, they had got rid of the former minister of the interior, José Abrantes, who was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment in August 1989 and who died of a “heart attack” in January 1991. When I contracted acute otitis, the prison doctor prescribed me medicine that, far from making me feel better, had the effect of making my ailment worse every day. Fortunately, during a visiting session, a doctor who was there to see a relative took interest in my case. He discovered that the medicine I was taking was going to lead straight to a stroke. Indignant, he complained to the prison governor, accusing him of trying to kill me. Then, by threatening to denounce him to the authorities, this doctor got permission to treat me himself, once a week, in the visiting room. Thanks to this guardian angel, who advised me to stop going to the prison infirmary, I immediately stopped the initial treatment and was saved. Without him, this book would not exist.

Indeed, it was actually in La Condesa that I decided to write this book. One day, when I was sunbathing in the prison courtyard, I looked at the blue sky and swore to myself that, as the
Comandante
had not had the slightest scruples about locking me up here or making my family suffer from this injustice despite all I had sacrificed to protect him, I would reveal Fidel Castro’s real nature to the world. The idea for this book was thus born one sunny day in 1995, almost twenty years ago, when I was wearing the gray uniform of an ordinary prisoner several miles from the fine sand where nonchalant tourists from all over the world came to drink mojitos and dance the salsa, not concerning themselves for a moment with the fate of the victims of the Castro brothers.

Finally, two years after my arrest—not a day more or less—I was released. I was terribly weakened. Although I had put on a bit of weight since my guardian angel doctor had begun looking after me, I still weighed forty-four pounds less than at the time of my arrest.

Out of prison, I went to Personal Security to put my situation in order. And there I met with a surprise: reading the documents they gave me, I saw that my right to a retirement pension had been recognized at least two years earlier, in other words, before my arrest! Which meant that, from an official point of view, I was already a civilian and not a soldier at the time of my trial. And that the whole procedure was therefore unlawful since as a civilian I could not appear before a military court. . . . But I swallowed my rage. At least I had got out. . . .