“Když jsem byl zavřený ve věznici La Cabaña... totiž, byl jsem tam zavřený ze začátku, jenom malou chvíli, nicméně úplně to stačilo, abych mohl spatřit některé ohyzdnosti, jako například… jednoho vězně popravili, a jeho žena… oni jí to neřekli… a ona ho přišla navštívit týden poté. A bachař na ní zařval: „Tohodle červa jsme zabili před pár dny. Jestli chceš chlapa, budeš mi muset sehnat jinýho.“ Ta ubohá žena tam na místě omdlela. Nebyla připravená slyšet něco takového.”
“I cut the bar, but I had no strength, I was very skinny, I did not have the strength to bend it, so I asked one farmer, who was very strong, to bend it. And the peasant went and bent the bar, and I climbed down along with Rafael Jerada, another prisoner who had been raised in Escambray as a peasant, of whom I had no doubt that he was on our side. Why did I not doubt him? Because he had arrived with a bullet in one hand and... full of worms, the wound almost rotten, and we healed his hand with spirits of salts [hydrochloric acid], which is a disinfectant used to clean floors. And so... a spy would never be willing to make a sacrifice so extreme, so he offered me all the guarantees that told me he was an honorable person. Rafael and I climbed out. The guard noticed immediately noticed, but he had to go out and around to the yard we had jumped down in to, and that took a few seconds, which was enough time for us to leg it really fast. That was not the speed of courage but the speed of fear, which is much more powerful than the speed of courage. The fear we had was, as Jerada said, he was very funny, he said: ‘We were more afraid than a hundred nuns.’”
“I had already seen how authoritarianism disappeared in Spain, I had yet to see how Communism disappeared in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, and the key was in Yakovlev, and it was also in Gorbachev. In that conversation with Yakovlev, I remember that after explaining to me the number of steps they had taken and the reforms they had undertaken, how everything had failed... and I asked at the end of the conversation that lasted several hours: ‘But, Mr Yakovlev, what happened, why did the reforms not work?’ And he said: ‘Well, because we found out, and we understood at the end, that Communism really does not adapt to human nature.’ And that’s true. Communism is an artificial construct for people who do not exist. That is why they have to manufacture new people, but they’ll never manufacture them because what they actually do is they kill the original people, but they never build new ones because it doesn’t work that way, and it is far from human nature, and therefore it fails. What is sad is that it has already cost a hundred million dead to find out something that was quite obvious.”
“This was in December, on the 28th, when we were arrested. On the 3rd or 4th of January, they judged us and condemned us to 20 years in prison, in a trial which was a total farce. The sentences had already been decided by the Ministry of the Interior, the court could have gone to sleep, as one of the judges who judged us did – he was half asleep, and it did not matter as the sentences had already been made. But since I was 17 years old, and the law... the previous law still existed... the law said that children under 18 could not be shot dead, and that those under 18 years of age had to serve their sentences in a juvenile prison until they were 18. And it was there... where the other three who were over 18 years old were sentenced to prison... one was murdered, Alfredo Carril was murdered in the Isle of Pines, the other two served 20 years in prison. In short, it was terrible. And they put me in the jail that was called Piti Fajardo at that time, but it had been the prison of Torrens, a jail for underaged political prisoners, where the youngest of the political prisoners was 11 years old. Why was an 11-year-old boy imprisoned? Well, because that boy, when they shot his father, he decided to set fire to some sugar cane plantations. They said he was a pyromaniac. He was not a pyromaniac, he was a child who was angry because his dad had been killed.”
Carlos Alberto Montaner was born on 3 April 1943. His father worked as a journalist and his mother was a teacher. As a boy, Carlos attended a private school; he noticed that many important people would come to meet up in his family’s house from time to time - this was because his father participated in the political life of the country. He married at the age of 16 and at first sympathized with the Revolution. However, he soon learned of Fidel Castro’s Communist orientation and joined the efforts of the Rescate Revolucionario (Revolutionary Rescue) group, which opposed this tendency. This led to him being arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison. However, since he was only 17 years old, he was placed in a prison for juvenile political prisoners. With the help of other colleagues, he managed to escape and found asylum at the Embassy of Honduras, where he remained from March to September 1961 along with 150 other people. When diplomatic relations between Honduras and Cuba broke following the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the asylees were taken under the protection of Venezuela. About six months later, Carlos Montaner travelled to the United States, where he was reunited with his family. He began studying Hispanic American literature at the University of Miami. Upon graduating, he started teaching literature at the University of Puerto Rico. He successfully applied for a PhD scholarship in Madrid. In Spain he started a regular column and increasingly focused on writing. He published several books, and after the fall of the Franco regime in 1975, he joined the liberal movement and founded the Cuban Liberal Party. When he understood that change in Cuba was not yet possible, he returned to an intellectual life: he was a correspondent for several prominent newspapers around the world; he wrote columns, commented on Latin American affairs and published books. He currently resides in the United States and works at CNN in Spanish. He has a son and a daughter.
