“Prison Notebooks”: the book that tells how the Cuban regime’s prisons are

A book lover decides to create a literature and storytelling workshop in a Cuban prison nineteen years ago, out of pure altruism. A few months ago, he met a Spanish publisher on a terrace in Havana. This is the genesis of “Cuadernos Carcelarios”, a collection of biographical experiences of Cuban prisoners that naturally reveal the prison idiosyncrasy on the island, true and raw stories that pass between drama and humor.

It all started with Ernesto Arcia and his literature workshop in Combinado del Este, a maximum security penitentiary near Havana. The 39-year-old Cuban, who also currently teaches poetry, has spent nearly half of his life helping to stimulate the art of reading and writing in inmates, giving lessons to anyone who “wishes.” to train ”, without distinction.

By the workshop “Many prisoners have been trained for their release”Arcia explained proudly from the Malecón, away from prying ears and in search of a decent internet, particularly coveted these days in Cuba. “Some people discover a hidden appetite for learning and end up in college”he added.

The human stories of people with problems and the harsh conditions in Cuban prisons are the main focus of the stories, but for the director of Hurón Azul, the Spanish publishing house that published this book last July, Nacho Rodríguez, perhaps being “the balance between what you can talk about and what you can’t talk about” in Cuba today is the central reason for this.

There is hardly any transparent information about Cuban prisons. We know that there are 200 prisons on the island; in Belgium, with a population almost traced (11.4 million), there are only 35. In addition, Cuba is the fifth country with the largest prison population in the world as a proportion of its inhabitants, according to the World Prison Brief study by the Crime and Justice Institute at the University of London in 2013. Cuba is one of the few countries where the the data has been updated since then, this has not been possible.

PRISON ISLAND

The illustrations by Luis Trápaga, a Cuban artist living in Havana, vividly accompany the stories, but also They provide their own chapter which tells a visual story through drawings, an acidic critique against repression and subjugation, which is titled the “Prison Island Decalogue”.. “Before, you had to ask for permission to leave Cuba, and it was a kind of prison in that sense,” Trápaga said. And nowadays?

“It is the artistic piece with which I have ever worked with the greatest freedom (thematic), I was able to draw whatever I wanted”. However, Luis reveals that “a lot of my artist friends have problems on the island” and remembers that he also spent a few nights in jail for “attending a performance in the Plaza de la Revolución. It seemed to them like that. an offense ”.

For the cervix, “Violence and eroticism among the prisoners (all male) is the common element” in most of the stories, where homosexual sex abounds in the stories.

An opening eroticism that translates into a total uprising against the slogan “work will make you men”, a pithy phrase that hailed the forced labor camp that Ernesto “Che” Guevara built on the Guanahacabibes peninsula afterwards. the victory of the Revolution in 1959, and that in its beginnings it housed Cuban homosexuals, enemies of the state because of their sexual condition.

In another of the stories in the book, he details the prison stay of Pablo, an inmate who was sentenced to 40 years for killing a cow. Cuban writer Jorge Carpio, who edited the prison reports, explained that the sentence is “hyperbole, but it humorously reflects the harsh punishments prisoners face for common crimes,” and added than the penalties for cattle rustling were severe in the early years of the Cuban revolution.

POLITICAL PRISON

The only account of a political prisoner is that of Ángel Santiesteban, a well-known Cuban writer and dissident. His brother tried to escape the island three decades ago and he was sentenced to fourteen months when he was only 17 for not betraying him.

Santiesteban, hidden in a house in the Cuban capital, explained, worried about an arrest he considers imminent due to his participation in the July 11 protests, that his story was written during his long prison on hunger strike. , as an adult and for political reasons: “They mistreated me by giving me treacherous liquid when I was already on the verge of starvation, and they showed me pictures of my son, also detained and tortured.”

The story came out because prisoners, “friends who played for me,” took him to the streets. And he also denounces that he now only wants “to live, write and create in freedom.” Indicate”.

Carlos Montenegro, a pioneer of Cuban prison stories, and whose narration is the first of the stories in the book, written from prison and published in 1929 of the last century, said: “Think of a country under tyranny, it’s a prison”

(with information from the EFE)

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