In his house in Altamira, in eastern Cuba, the electricity has gone out, the heat is suffocating and José Daniel Ferrer, the renowned opposition figure recently released from prison, adjusts the collar of his shirt and drinks a glass of juice, the first food throughout the day. When he left the Mar Verde prison he was hungry, he was tired, but it was enough to get home to feel an energy that, he says, he has only experienced at the age of 18. Dozens of friends, activists and neighbors have come and greeted him, coming and going, impressed by the fact that they are seeing him today and not—as they thought—in seven months, the time remaining on his sentence of four years and 14 days, the punishment imposed by the Government for participating in the massive protests of July 11, 2021.
He has permanent pain in his right arm from the last beating that the prison officers gave him, and chronic gastritis from the many hunger strikes he went on, but Ferrer seems strong, with the same voice as always, of a sharp and martial tone. When three and a half years ago, the Government of Havana put him behind bars, he had just seen the biographical film Hotel Rwandawhich tells the story of human rights defender Paul Rusesabagina. Ferrer now wants to find out what happened to the activist, if he is free, if he is in prison, if he is still alive. “I don’t know what happened to him,” he says. “As soon as I can connect to the internet I want to know.” He understands that in all this time the world has become a different place, from which he was almost absent, but he is interested in catching up, reading about the death of the Russian opponent Alexei Navalni, finding out what is happening in the Middle East or Venezuela , to grab a cult movie or a book.
The last one he read in prison was The Rich Methoda best-seller that his family managed to take him and in which he has learned the art of managing finances. That’s what he was doing when on Wednesday afternoon he stopped and went out to a prison room to watch television. He waited for the soap opera to end at 3:45 pm The Raven what the rest of the inmates were watching and asked to change the channel Telesur. The newscast announced that President Joe Biden had removed Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism. Immediately, he suspected that he was going to be free.
-There I told a prisoner friend: “Things are going to happen, write it down, because the Biden Government is not going to make those concessions to the regime if it does not change something.”
Ferrer knows this type of negotiations intimately. In 2010, when he was serving a 25-year sentence after the hunt for dissidents in Cuba known as the Black Spring, he was one of the 75 prisoners that Raúl Castro released as a result of negotiations with the Catholic Church and the Government of Spanish José Luis. Shoemaker.
Now, on the television of the Mar Verde prison, another news item claimed that Miguel Díaz-Canel would free 553 after the intermediation of the Vatican. His inmate friend suddenly turned around and said: “Hey, are you crazy? How did you know that was coming?”
Ferrer was released on parole, something he did not want to admit. “They release me completely or leave me imprisoned until the dictatorship falls,” he told the senior prison officials on Thursday morning, when they told him that he had to go home, that his wife and son five years old were waiting for him outside the prison. They almost forcibly took him out of prison, where they forcibly put him more than three years ago.
Ask. How did you get the news that you would be among the 553 prisoners released after negotiations with Joe Biden’s administration?
Answer. At around 10:30 in the morning, political police major Julio Fonseca told me to get dressed, that a legal team wanted to talk to me, that they were going to release me, but that they wanted to notify me about the conditions. I told them that I did not accept conditions of any kind. That they would free me completely or leave me imprisoned until the dictatorship falls. Then a lieutenant colonel and another officer arrived, they said they had to take me. They took me to an office of the prison headquarters. There I told them: ‘And what is this? Another judicial farce?’ They said that they had come to notify me of my conditional release, due to a process that the revolutionary Government has decided to develop as a gesture of good will with Pope Francis. I told them that I did not accept parole, that they kidnapped my family, they stole everything in my house, they did not even leave chairs, they took the television, they fabricated crimes on me, they beat me in prison, they have tried to starve me to death. , I have had to protest, go on hunger strikes to be allowed food and medicine that they do not have.
They told me: ‘Well, you still have to listen. You are going to be released on conditional release and if you do not comply with the requirements and violate socialist legality, you will be taken back to prison.’ I told them: ‘Well, let’s save ourselves all these procedures and create another crime now so that when my sanction expires in July, they will impose another one on me.’ When I told them that I did not accept the conditional release or the warning document, they told me that then the witnesses, that is, their officers, would sign it. I told them that I was going to the prison, but they told me that I couldn’t go any further inside.
Q. That is to say, despite the fact that he confronted them, and their refusal to be released on parole, this is an order that they had to comply with in any way.
R. If I sit down in protest, they pick me up and take me home. Because the order is that we be on the streets before Donald Trump assumes the presidency so that he does not reverse the measures. That’s what I saw from the conversation and I told them.
Q. What conditions were you told this probation entailed?
R. They said that I had to go to a court to sign monthly and I had to go to work wherever that court placed me.
Q. Is this something you plan to do?
R. I have always been very clear about that. I have never sympathized in the slightest with Lenin, nor Marx, nor Engels, nor anyone on that team. But Lenin said that to make the revolution, completely committed cadres were needed. I don’t have time to sell tomatoes or grow lettuce, my time is to fight for freedom and democracy. The only thing I need is a change of clothes and the minimum amount of food. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t go to parties, I have no other expenses, therefore, I don’t need to work for the regime.
Q. What do you think that, for the second time, the Government puts you on the street for an external negotiation, both mediated by the Catholic Church?
R. There is a mix of emotions. You know that the Church and the Government of the United States have the best intentions and we appreciate that with all our hearts. But there is one question that worried me then and that worries me now. When Cardinal Jaime Ortega called me to prison in 2010, he asked if I agreed to leave for Spain. I told him that I did not accept exile under any conditions. I ended up referring him to a biblical passage, to Luke 13, verse 32. It is the moment when some Pharisees tell Jesus to leave, that Herod wants to kill him. Jesus tells him something like: ‘Go and tell that fox that today and tomorrow I will continue to heal and on the third day I am going to Jerusalem because a prophet should not die outside of Jerusalem.’ In other words, he was telling the cardinal: ‘Tell that fox called Raúl Castro that I’m not going anywhere, that if they want, they can kill me, but I’m not going to leave the country.’ What worries me about this, and is even painful, is how in the current situation they allow the Cuban regime to publish a disrespectful note, because they present themselves triumphant, like the magnanimous Government, which in a gesture of good will towards His Holiness frees 553 prisoners. It should not be like this when it comes to situations that involve so much human suffering, so many violations of so many human rights and, on top of that, when the regime does not make any commitment to respect basic fundamental rights or undertakes that they will not retaliate and put the victims who have just been released back into jail.
Q. So do you think they could take you back to prison at some point?
Yes of course. And there we will begin the new chapter of that vicious circle in which they imprison you, torture you, pressure you to leave the country, make you sick, cause you all kinds of problems, beat your family, threaten to evict them from their home. . Then the church intervenes again, a Democratic administration asks them for something in exchange for removing a measure or punishment, and they release those who should never have been imprisoned. That is a mockery of the intelligence and dignity of the human being.
Q. Is exile still not an option for you now?
R. I have never contemplated that nor will I contemplate it. And I confess to you, I love my family, I love life too much, my children, my grandchildren, my mother, my wife, and I had never thought about committing suicide, but in prison I went through a situation where I believed that my physical and mental health were deteriorating too quickly. I had intense headaches, I felt deafening ringing noises that kept me from sleeping, and I had hallucinations for the first time in my life. I think they drugged me with some kind of substance at that time, because there is no other explanation. So I considered suicide rather than surrender. They repeated to me that if I agreed to leave the country, the situation would be resolved and they would set me free. But I told them, my wife and my family, before giving up I resort to what I have never thought of doing, I prefer to take my own life before giving up my fight.
Q. Now life resumes outside, what do you plan to do?
R. There are too many things that I have before me. My family, the fight, which continues and is one of my great priorities. I will also help, within my possibilities, the activists, the political prisoners who remain in prison. I am going to continue assisting other people with food and medicine as I did before I was imprisoned.
