Facing State Counterintelligence in Cuba [Part 1]

Angel Santiesteban

Angel’s shirt after the beatings

Our adolescence was fertilized with novels and TV series that marked our aesthetics and personalities.

How many times did we read the novels, “Here the Sands are Cleaner,” “If I Die Tomorrow,” or the series “It Had to Be in Silence,” with most of us enjoying those fantasies of socialist heroes who, guided by Cuban “Counterintelligence” managed to outwit their enemies.

Over time they have become socialist fantasy trash and the young people of today consider them terrible literary works because of their insubstantial content and their unbelievability.

On Thursday, November 8, we went to present our respects to the parents of Antonio Rodiles, elderly people around 90 years old, and of course his closest accomplices and companions in their ideological ideas. We also wanted to demand the release of the unjustly detained lawyers Laritza Diversent, Yaremis Flores, and Veizant Boloy. We arrived at the Acosta police station and met up with the independent attorney Wilfredo Vallín in the offices there.

They refused to let us see them, from which I inferred they had beaten one or more of them and so they hid them from us.

We could not be fainthearted before the abuse

We stood in front of the police station, coming to be, if I’m not mistaken, seven human rights activists, or bloggers, or opponents, or whatever you want to call us, among them Yoani Sanchez of course, Claudio Fuentes, the professional photographer, Eugenio Leal, the activist Arabel Villafuerte, among others. The truth is that we found ourselves there because it pained us to know that there was an innocent suffering in Castro’s dungeons.

The operation was already closing in. Around us we found a group of “civilians,” military whom we know aim to repress. We were aware that our abusers were just three yards from us. At times I stared at them fixedly to unmask their intentions, dreams, fantasies, but their criminal visage prevented me from doing it. I assure you we were laughing, or perhaps it was a laugh of pity for them.

Someone warned that at the corner they were arresting those who wanted to join the group. They started to force them into the patrol cars and began beating them as usual. We were about a hundred yards away, and in the distance, perhaps out of fear and love, we thought it was Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo. It wouldn’t be a lie if we said we were still for a few seconds, we all knew what approaching them would mean, but without any starting pistol we ran as one, I remember that Yoani went like a mother when one of her pups is stolen and she had already forgotten the words of Reinaldo Escobar, her husband, when he said before saying goodbye to be careful, and also the caresses of her son, whom perhaps she would not be there to hug when he got home from school.

The truth was that she went asking for an explanation of why he was being arrested and beaten. In the midst of the siege I watched her unchecked bravery and in a second the door of the patrol car where they had two arrested activists opened and they wanted to put her body into the car. There was a moment where I was frightened because her feet were under the back tires and the car started to move. But they pulled and pushed her. Yoani faced the police and her bravery made them small. Then a boorish official came wanting to provoke her, challenge her. And the brilliance of Yoani was to ask her from which tenement she’d emerged, and to say to her that she was showing no composure at all with her display of trashiness

I was right next to Yoani and I could see the eyes of the officer, and see she was disarmed, as if an iota of shame had escaped against her will because she saw that he was knocked out before the round even began. And to Yoani, whom she knew wasn’t in her weight class ideologically or in principles, she turned her back.

When the order came to grab us

Then we heard when they gave the order to grab us. They pushed us, separated us. I looked around while they were grabbing me and saw Claudio in a patrol car, they took Eugenio off in handcuffs and Yoani as well, and even put her in a patrol car.

When the patrol car came I gave in. I think we were not a force of resistance but of conscience, of justice, of the disorder that we had not originated. When they took me to sit in the car someone behind me said “get in, go,” and I was punched in the neck, without thinking I returned the blow, and they were devastating, as if they had suffered the greatest offense, or it was only that this horde of abnormals had been waiting for a tiny spark to explode into cowardly and abnormal violence. It was like they were waiting for the sound of a whistle to begin their cowardice.

I never imagined that this might be recorded, you already saw the beating they gave me. Although I have not seen the video, you know that watching YouTube from Cuba like everything else is impossible. The blows that hurt most were when they opened the back door on the right: they were like the kicks from a beast, and for a moment I thought they had fractured my skull, there were so many of them and they were so hard that the blows others were giving me on the ribs, back and legs weren’t important. I don’t know if they were beating me with a ring or brass knuckles, but the blows were so forceful they broke my head, my lip, and like an urgent warning of personal salvation, in my semi-conscious state, I decided to get up and get out of the car.

I will not describe more what you can see in the video. But one details that perhaps you can’t see is that, on leaving an officer who was at my back was bragging, he said, “You’ll see if he straightens up now,” and he squeezed me with his arm around my neck until I started to feel faint from lack of air, he did it with such force I thought he’d separated my head from my body.

They led me to another patrol car to take us to the back yard of the police station. I looked at the other cars and they were sitting there, like me, waiting. Next to Yoani there was a woman dressed in civilian clothes. Then they changed the car I was in and I sat beside Eugenio. The voice coming out of the station said, “Let’s get out of here, we have to get out of here,” but it was said with terror. I think they feared more activists would come or that the people who had watched were starting to move towards the entrance to the station.  Keep reading >>