All Exiles Are Possible

All Exiles Are Possible / Luis Felipe Rojas
Posted on September 7, 2014

When I say exile, I only think of the word life. That was what happened
to me at the meeting "Fight for Liberation against Castro-communism,"
which the writer Julio M. Shiling generously coordinated and which was
held at the West Dade Regional Library of Coral Way, Miami, last July 10.

Attending the discussion were no more and no less than the well-known
former political prisoners Angel de Fana, Agapito "El Guapo" Rivera,
Jorge Gutierrez "El Sherif" and others who presented an overview of the
insurrectional struggle from 1959 to the present.

De Fana's words and his hopes for a future Cuba moved me. Twenty years
in jail did not seem to have put a dent in the energy of this man who
confronted the torture and prison horror of the Castro regime. "We must
fight, not for the Cuba that we lost but for the one that awaits us
ahead," I heard him say.

Agapito, a peasant known for having fought in the central plains of the
island against the militias and formal army, spoke of the bravery of
those who accompanied him in that feat (there is no other name for this
action). The loss of 11 relatives has not made him a resentful man,
although pain emerges with each word for a country that could not be.

"No one knows the pain that is felt on learning of the death of the
youngest of the brothers that you have taken to war," says the man who
earned the nickname "Handsome" in the prisons where they tried to break
him for the 25 long years that he spent without tasting freedom. His
liberation in 1988 must have been a relief for his jailers, according to
the anecdotes that are told by those who shared galley, hallway and
punishment cells with Agapito.

We live likewise through the story by Jorge Gutierrez, who landed in one
of the infilitration teams days before the Cuban expedition in the Bay
of Pigs. The loss of friends that had sent him off days before, the
bitter flavor of the disappointment of promised help that never arrived,
were related in detail by Gutierrez with a dynamic that left no room for
doubts.

The other fight, the same country

Roberto Luque Escalona like Normando Hernandez related experiences of
what is known as the peaceful resistance struggle, which although it has
its detractors on both sides of the island, gave rise to one of the
samples of respect that Cuba deserves.

Those who preceded Luque and Hernandez recognized the co-existence of
both methods without sidestepping one or the other. Luque as well as
Hernandez explored anecdotes that illustrated the advocacy of human
rights, the confrontation of a more sophisticated military, which
although assisted by Moscow, since its beginning was refining methods of
repression from physical to psychological torture: to the point that at
the beginning of 1980 many countries ignored what was happening on Dr.
Castro's island. So far the majority of nations ignore the lack of
liberty in Cuba.

It has been a good opportunity, a landscape portrait of thousands of
Cubans who do not fit in a single photo. Thanks to the labor of Shiling
and his insistence on learning more of the untold history of the
resistance against communism in Cuba.

Translated by mlk.

17 July 2014

Source: All Exiles Are Possible / Luis Felipe Rojas | Translating Cuba -
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