One of six who were unexpectedly released recalls prison ordeal

By TRACEY EATON / The Dallas Morning News

ALAMAR, Cuba – For Manuel Vázquez, prison was hell, a place of rats and roaches, bedbugs and mosquitoes.

In June, he was unexpectedly freed, more than 16 years short of his 18-year sentence.

But his torment isn't over.

"I came out of prison completely crazy!" he yelled from his fifth-floor apartment in Alamar, east of Havana. "Tell them I'm crazy!"

Mr. Vázquez, 52, was among the 75 dissidents, writers and librarians sentenced to prison terms of up to 28 years in April 2003. Now he's one of six who have been freed. And his case illustrates the hard road ahead for any Cuban – free or imprisoned – who opposes Fidel Castro's socialist rule.

In better days, Mr. Vázquez worked as an independent journalist. He sold books at a market in Old Havana. He wrote poetry. He took jabs at the socialist economy and the country's social ills.

Under the pseudonym Pablo Cedeño, he began writing for Cubanet, a Miami-based nonprofit group that is partly funded by the U.S. government, which is trying to bring about regime change in Cuba. Later he used his real name.

By then, Cuban agents had infiltrated the ranks of the independent journalists. They taped phone calls. And they say they found out that Mr. Vázquez and others were bent on maligning Cuba, writing about such topics as crime, corruption and prostitution.

All that, prosecutors said, served U.S. interests, distorted reality, gave Cuba a bad name and undermined the revolution.

For their work, prosecutors said, the journalists made lots of money – "ridiculous sums," as court documents put it.

Mr. Vázquez said it wasn't really that much: Less than $100 per month. And when arrested, he had only $3,057 in savings, court documents say.

While in prison, he wrote a diary that his wife, Yolanda Huerga, smuggled to the outside. It told of rancid food and rotting mattresses.

"Oh, my old, old, tired bones!" he lamented in a May 31, 2003, diary entry. "A lot of heat, many mosquitoes, many ideas and memories – all banging up against each other."

He also complained about prison officials watching him, taking his picture and giving him shots – vaccines.

"The only thing missing is that they put a registration number on our rear ends," he wrote in his diary. "We're so dangerous."

Leaders of Cuba's political opposition, also heavily infiltrated by state security agents, say they believe authorities released the six prisoners because they were in poor health.

"Evidently they didn't want them to die in prison," said René Gómez Manzano, one of four dissidents jailed in 1997 – and later released – for writing "The Fatherland Belongs to All," a paper that criticized the one-party system and called for change.

Félix Bonné, another author of the paper, called the freeing of the six Cubans "not even a small step. The Cuban government hasn't done anything."

"The government felt pressured. That's why they did it," said Oswaldo Payá, leader of the Varela Project, a petition drive seeking to reform the socialist system from within.

Cuban officials decline to say why the prisoners have been released.

Miguel Valdés, 47, a political dissident and former television technician, said he's just glad to be home.

"The government was afraid I'd die in jail," said Mr. Valdés, who has heart problems.

Out since June 9, he said he plans to "continue fighting."

Back in Alamar, Mr. Vázquez is fighting, too. But it's taken a toll, his wife said.

"Manuel thinks that God is speaking through him," she said.
 

Over the last year, Ms. Huerga was among the many wives of jailed dissidents and journalists who risked their own freedom in denouncing prison conditions, staging silent marches and demanding that their loved ones' be released.

Now that her husband is free, she doesn't want to get involved in the political opposition.

"I'm relieved Manuel was released. But I'm also afraid because in Cuba nothing is certain."