To die in installments and then continue living.

By: Pedro Corzo - 23/02/2026

Guest columnist.
Share:     

In these days of renewed hope, we survivors of Cuban political imprisonment tend to remember more frequently the comrades who have passed away.

These memories are heightened on the first Friday of each month when our brother Ángel de Fana summons us to a reunion through a lunch where we reinforce identity and commitments, or when Ramiro Gómez Barrueco calls us to commemorate another anniversary of the closing of the Isle of Pines Prison, the 59th, in just over a month, the same happens when we again have the privilege of hearing brother Mario Fajardo sing, a pleasant memory of the times when our lives were battered by aridity.

I must write that the phrase that titles this column was said with great irony by the recently deceased in the historic city of Trinidad, Oscar Esquerra Velaz, a member of the glorious Escambray cause, who after serving his sentence was resentenced to another two years in prison because the dictatorship did not believe that prison had defeated him, an abuse that they inflicted on many other prisoners.

Nevertheless, Oscar and the others were always confident that they would survive the trials of that hell, despite the beatings from the henchmen and the criminal deprivations to which they were subjected.

I met Oscar more than sixty years ago in Circular #1 of the Isle of Pines prison, a jail built by General Gerardo Machado who prophetically said, to the astonishment of an official at the dimensions of the penitentiary, "Don't worry, a crazy person will come along for whom it will be too small."

The Madman Arrived in 1959, a truly devilish figure, Fidel Castro, who within three years of his rule had overcrowded the prisons and built dozens of dungeons, including three on the island where the prison was located. These buildings were silenced by the thunderous firing squad and an insatiable repression that has never truly ended.

When the circular buildings were dynamited with the aim of blowing it up with thousands of men inside, several brave men from the different buildings went down into the tunnels to deactivate the explosives. One of the survivors of that feat was Ricardito Vázquez, who took photos of the cartridges thanks to a small camera that his sister managed to give him surreptitiously during a visit. Others, part of that heroic list, were Eugenio Llamera, Oscar himself, and Raul Martínez, whom we called "Iron" because of the formidable power of his punches.

Esquerra was very witty and quick-witted, always characterized by his unwavering commitment to the return of democracy to Cuba. I remember a medical student approaching him one day to tell him contritely that he had received a telegram that his former classmates were graduating as doctors, to which he replied, "They are graduating as doctors, but you are graduating as a patriot."

He also held our families in very high regard. He asserted that the relatives of prisoners suffered even more than the prisoners themselves because they were harassed and humiliated, and they also had to sacrifice what little food they could find to bring to their imprisoned son, father, or husband—a reality that led the Cuban Institute of Historical Memory Against Totalitarianism, at the suggestion of Alfredo Elías and Enrique Ruano, to create the “Clara Abrahan de Boitel” Order, which is awarded to relatives who have supported their loved ones in prison.

I repeat, in these times of a resurgence of hope, it is prudent to bear in mind that all Cubans opposed to totalitarianism, whether in prison with bars or in the antechamber, have been dying in installments and reviving in an anguish that is increasingly more harrowing than before.

The present, without a doubt, is marked by the most inhumane devastation imaginable. The perennial crisis endured by the citizens of our country has intensified like never before. Cubans suffer a situation worse than that of 18th-century slaves, with the added aggravation that they all readily know there is a better life out there, and that to achieve it they only have to break the chains that bind them.

«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».