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Chapter One, page 19
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next
sight of
that woman hurling questions in English at Fidel for almost five hours,
questions that no one had asked him before, left me speechless. What about
political
prisoners? she wanted to know.
When I was little, I had heard a story about a young man in the neighborhood
who was sent to jail and later executed by a firing squad for conspiring
against the
revolution. His bride had gone crazy, the story went; she spent her days
in a catatonic
state, looking out the window of her imposing but crumbling house across
from our apartment. I thought of my mother’s cousin, whom I remembered
vaguely. He had been in prison on an island south of Havana, and my father
had
flown in a small plane to see him several times. The man fled Cuba in a boat
as
soon as he was released. The son of my father’s closest friend at work
had also
been in prison, sentenced to thirty years for trying to leave the country
illegally in
a boat. I had always thought that those were isolated incidents, aberrations
of a
regime that felt threatened by its enemies to the north. Yet here was Fidel
on television
admitting that he held maybe two or three thousand political prisoners
in Cuba’s jails. Not only that, he said that, at one point, more than
fifteen thousand
Cubans had been jailed for political reasons. Finally Ms. Walters asked Fidel
to say a few words in English for the American people. His words were
instantly translated to Spanish. He said that the americanos were hardworking
people, honest people, even idealistic. Fidel added that he hoped the people
of
Cuba and the people of the United States could be friends. That, he said,
was his
sincere hope.
When we turned off the television, my father remained pensive in the darkened
living room. The message was clear, he said. Changes were coming. If Fidel
were willing to talk to his enemies, who knew? Maybe we could dare to dream
again. Not about the kind of radical changes that would make us want to stay
in
Cuba, my father said, but dream about obtaining the one thing he wanted more
than anything else in life: a visa to the United States. All he needed now—all
Fidel
was after, really—was a little push, a hint from Washington or from
Miami
that the Americans were willing to listen. But who, my father wondered, citing
an old proverb, who would be the one to place the bell around the cat’s
neck?
