Cubanet.org has been gathering documentation from political prisoners in Cuba, mainly through scribbled missives and notes in microscopic handwriting smuggled out of prison. These messages are called “balas” or bullets, as is most contraband since it’s usually smuggled out in body cavities.
These documents are important first hand accounts from prisons where the UN, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have never gained access. Dissidents and failed emigrants are housed with violent offenders in infrahuman conditions.
The following drawings were done by Jesús Joel Díaz Hernández in 1999. They are particularly valuable to me in that they are from the prison where Jorge lost his arms and spent a total of 5 years. Since there are no photographic reference I can use, this eyewitness graphic account is helpful to me. I wrote a previous post on Canaleta HERE
Translation: Note: please show this to all my friends and whomever wants to see it. They’re all alike. The punishment cells are the same way, but the “bed” is made of concrete and they have neither window nor light. The rod on the wall is for holding up the bed if one wishes. The window is 1.90 m (6.2 ft) from the floor.
Note: Opening my arms I can easily touch both walls widthwise. It is 2.70m (8.8 ft) long. The same for height.
Solitary confinement cell #36, Ciego de Avila (CAV) province “Canaleta”.
Always, Yoel.
Translation: View from the window of my cell. You can see part of the maximum security perimiter of the provisonal prison of Ciego de Avila, “Canaleta”
Julio 8 de 1999. Always, Yoel.
From Reporters Without Borders:
Jesús Joel Díaz Hernández, head of the Cooperativa Avileña de Periodistas Independientes (CAPI) based in the central Cuban city of Ciego de Avila, was freed on 17 January when his prison term was shortened without explanation. He had been arrested on 18 January 1999 and sentenced the next day to four years in prison for being “a danger to society.” He was held in the Canaleta jail in Ciego de Avila, frequently complained about bad prison conditions and went on several hunger strikes. His family said he had probably been jailed “to set an example” to local youths not to become independent journalists. Two days after his release, he was summoned before a local court and told that the slightest criminal offence would put him back in prison to serve out the rest of his term. But he decided to resume his journalistic activities. He was detained twice in March and August. The first time, he was released after promising to leave the country. In October, he was summoned by the police twice and on 1 November, he was given a “warning” for not working for the state.
Joel left Cuba for the United States in 2002, where he was granted political asylum.
read more about Joel’s prison experience here:
Hey Peter, interesting material, looking forward to seeing some work in progress. Are you planning a more straightforward memoir in the lines of Joe Sacco and Marjane Satrapi’s work or something with more surrealistic tendencies along the lines of Waltz with Bashir?
I think I’m more in sync with Sacco and Satrapi in terms of approach, although less cartoony in style. There is a limit to the artistic license I can take when approaching a biographical sketch, an historic event with multiple interpretations might lend itself more to flights of fancy.
The thing is that this story has some outrageous episodes in it, and I’d hate to undercut the credibility of this having happended by employing magical realism. That being said, there will be dream/halucinatory sequences in which I can let loose.