Hombre del Silencio: The Prison Diary of Ramon Labanino [one of the Cuban 5 heroes] Part 4: Prisons; Living with Prisoners; Yoga Classes

PRISONS

I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. Matthew (10, 34)

Bloody Ground, Beaumont, Texas

The penitentiary in Beaumont, Texas, was called Bloody Land by Americans because of the high percentage of murders and violent acts that occurred there. It was very complex.

While still in prison in Miami, in order to put my martial arts knowledge into practice and not lose my physical shape, I became a teacher, and I had approximately ten students. I remember that one day of practice, when my future destiny in Texas was already known, a few of them said to me: Well, now you’re really going to have to use martial arts, because that prison is tough.

It was complex. And as a revolutionary, communist, Fidelist, we were very well identified, because the FBI was in charge of putting our photos in all the newspapers, we always had that inner feeling that eventually we would have to face a counterrevolutionary, that we were going to have to fight, and we had to be prepared for that, we were not going to allow them to disrespect us, it was very difficult for us and for the revolution, and we had that in our minds.

February 12, 2002, 8.30 pm

The day came for me to leave for prison, and I remember arriving in Beaumont, Texas on February 12, 2002 at about 8:30.  We were tired, exhausted, because it was a very long trip, by plane and bus, and in the plane we were chained all the time. We had our hands chained, with a black box, because for us, in addition to the normal chains, they put the black box, which is a block of solid iron that they put between the handcuffs, as a way of completely immobilizing your hands, so that you cannot move, because the friction of the metal cuts your skin and you start to bleed, it hurts, it is a terrible pain. To spend ten or twelve hours in those conditions, with a black box on, eating was impossible, because if you move it you get hurt, going to the bathroom is out of the question, because with that you can’t go to the bathroom. You have to put up with it and not go to the bathroom for ten hours, it is difficult. The times I had to move I preferred not to eat or drink water, so as not to have the desire to go to the bathroom. Besides, I was chained at the waist, and chained at the feet, and in those conditions when you arrive at the prison the least thing you want is to talk to anyone, what you want is for them to take away that martyrdom and lay down to sleep, to take off the handcuffs and lie down on the floor.

When I arrived, of course, as they always left me for last, the five of us were always left for the end, but that had its good side, because it allowed me to see the process that was happening in front of me, what was happening with the other prisoners. And the process was more or less fast, they put you in a room, they took off all your clothes to see if you had any tattoos that identified you with any mafia, with the Mexican mafia, for example, if you were from the Mexican mafia they put you with the Mexicans, if you were from the Washington D.C. mafia they put you with those people.

I noticed that the prisoners who entered before me were sitting in chairs, there was a security captain, who is the head of security at the prison, sitting in a chair, behind him three other officers, and he was looking at the prisoners’ file, which was tiny, with few sheets; and when I entered, my file was huge, almost half a meter high, and I assumed that everything was going to be a spectacle now. As soon as I sat down, they were already waiting for me, and the captain said to me: 

So you are a political prisoner, are you? Yes, I am a political prisoner.

Ah, that means you hate my President Bush.

It was the year 2002. My reasons for my opposition to Bush were well known, but I was not going to discuss politics with that man at that hour, I was tired, I am aware that it was all a provocation that would allow him to send me to the hole. Then, as we Cubans always do when faced with this kind of situation, I started to laugh, thinking that whatever he might say, I would be able to do it.

I was going to be sent to the hole.

Then the guy says to me:

Ah, you think you’re handsome, all right. I’m going to send you to the hole for a week, and at the end of the week I’m going to put you in the unit with the meanest Cuban here, who is also the head of the prison.

He calls me a bad Cuban, head of the prison, and I immediately think, that guy must be a counterrevolutionary, a gusano, well, I’m going to fight with him! And at that moment, it was fixed in my mind that I had to fight with that guy, because there was nothing else to do, I was not going to let him offend me. It was like the famous cat story, that’s how it was.

The fact is that I spent the week in the hole. They put me with two brown Americans, one had a pretty nasty cut on his face, a Boricua had cut his face, however, we became friends, and I took advantage of the friendship to practice a little martial arts, “because as I’m going to fight, let me be greased“. For me there was no other option.

At the end of the week I go to the unit. When you go to the unit they give you clothes, sheets, towels, soap, those things for you to live in the prison. The unit is two stories, but the bottom floor is long, quite wide, and when I walk through the door, in the distance, about ten meters away, I see a man sitting in a chair, leaning back, about my size, but skinny, with the carmelite prison shirt, buttoned up, ironed impeccably, and underneath an impeccable white sweater, ironed pants, polished boots with a tremendous shine, he looked like a handsome Cuban from the 80s, and I said to myself, this must be the guy. Next to him were two dark-haired men, also Cubans, shorter, with a strong, strong build, who seemed to me to be the bodyguards. As soon as I saw them, a movie started to play in my mind in which I fight against the three of them at the same time. The thing is that as soon as I cross the door the man calls me, he spoke to me in a bad way, and I was like the cat’s tale. I go to meet him, and since they were three against one, I stay about two meters away, thinking that if I got too close he wouldn’t give me time to react. Then he says to me:

Come here boy, are you one of those five spies of Fidel’s that the press is talking about?

There was no longer any doubt in my mind that I had to fight. And I answer him:

Look kid, yes, I am one of Fidel’s five men and so what? What do you want to do? Let’s settle this right now, right now.

Then that man who was sitting in the chair gets up like a spring and says to me: “My brother, you are really handsome…”

But the most important part of this whole story is what he tells me next:

“because you are men of Fidel”.

In other words, being a man of Fidel, in such a dangerous, unpredictable place as a maximum security prison in the United States, where I saw people die, I saw murders, terrible things; being a man of Fidel, gives you dignity, gives you courage, gives you everything, it means that you are faithful to your principles, to your people, that you do not betray, that you are handsome, that you are a man who fights for your country. Being a man of Fidel gives you protection, because one of the experiences in prison is that when we arrived at the places the prisoners knew that it was us, that we were the ones who were the ones who had to be protected.

Fidel’s men, people would come up to us, like, for example, El Musulmán, who would tell us: Fidel liberated us in Africa.

The Cuban people understand Fidel, the Cuban Revolution, and therefore, if someone messes with you, you let us know and we will help you. That is why I have said it everywhere and now I repeat it again, whatever work you do one day, whatever mission you fulfill in life, the highest pride, the highest honor that we Cubans have today is that we are and have the honor of being Fidel’s men and women.

After being placed in prison comes a period of looking for a cell to live in, looking for a job, getting to know the prison, which is very complex.

This man who received me is called Alejandro Maíz, and it turned out that we became good friends, and he helped me a lot in adapting to prison.

He was in prison for murder, he had killed someone. In the end he ended up serving twenty-five years in prison. He is now free, he lives in Miami now, but because of those things in life I used to say to him; hey Alejandro, compadre, someday I am going to write about you.

Would you allow me to say your real name, just in case? Yes, yes,  give my real name, he answered. That is why I affirm that his name is Alejandro Maíz, and that he served twenty-five years. And the thing is that this man, the day after my arrival, gathered all the Cubans in the yard, which is the part outside the dormitories, and introduced me. I will never forget that he said to them: Look, here I present Luis Medina, who is one of Fidel’s men. He is a handsome Cuban man, but besides that, he is my personal friend, and whoever messes with him messes with me, so look to see what you are going to do. Don’t let anyone touch him.

That was important at that difficult time. He was a person that people really respected, the man had a power in prison. If a movie were to be made, I think you would have to look for a character like him, with his way of being, because that guy looks like a mafioso, a guy more than a mafioso, a guy who knew how to move men, and they respected him a lot. And so it was, he helped me a lot, he helped me to know the prison, the politics of the prison.

Alejandro today is a free man, he writes to me now, especially at the beginning he used to write to me and ask me to send him autographed photos of me, because nobody believes that he is my friend. In Miami people tell him, hey, don’t be cheeky, how are you going to be Ramón’s friend, but that’s how it is, that’s the way things are in life.

Prison teaches you a lot of things, it teaches you how to learn from human beings. One thing that struck me is that many of the prisoners asked me when I got out to talk about prison, how difficult prison is in the United States.

Among those prisoners I met people who were bad criminals, criminals of despicable deeds, deeds that any person rejects. People who did not like the Revolution, who did not like Fidel, a strange thing, because we Cubans are very faithful, they did not like communism, they did not like socialism, nevertheless, that same man said like many others: But if the Americans go to Cuba, or if they go in to kill people, or to invade or whatever, I will take a rifle and defend Cuba from here. These profound things about human beings show that we are not black and white, that human beings are made up of many shades, and that getting to their essence is the most difficult thing of all.

Living with prisoners

I learned these things in prison. I learned how to deal with human beings. Prison in itself is a school, physically it is an impregnable fortress. The impression you get is that you can’t get out of there in any way, don’t even try, because they are very high walls, there are walls that are up to ten meters high, and on top of that they are super solid buildings, wide, with spiked fences on top, which have super sharp needles, so much so that if a bird passes by, it gets stuck. In addition, they are electrified. But before reaching that wall there is also a field of barbed wire, which is electrified, that is, if you jump over that wall, you would have to cross a barbed wire fence that has electricity, in short, the idea you get from that prison is that you will never get out of it.

There are some stories of prison breaks. I heard of one who wanted to escape, and he was a madman. I knew the story of a Colombian named Jorge Bueno, who also authorized me to mention his name, who escaped from a prison in New York. He was like on a second floor, and he watched the cameras, because on the outside there are cameras. There was a wide window where you could go out, but right in front of it they were watching the cameras. It was the laundry room, and so he managed to get the cameras to be obstructed, and at the moment when the cameras started to malfunction, at that precise moment, he grabbed a sheet, rolled it up, and jumped out the window. Everything was already calculated, and a few meters from where he fell, a car was waiting for him with a map, water, and food. Then he got into the car and drove away. He went from state to state until he was able to return to Colombia. That was more or less how he escaped. But the curious thing is that later, life itself led him to make a big mistake. He was supposed to be in hiding in Colombia, and when he was short of money, he had no way to work because he knew that the FBI was looking for him. Then Interpol and the FBI set a trap for him. They send him a guy that he knew could be working with the FBI, but he was careless, maybe because of his need. The man arrives in Bogota, starts looking for him, finds him and manages to call him and tell him to go see him, that he had some business for him. At first he was suspicious, but later, after so much insistence, he went to see him, and when he arrived they detained him.  He was one of the people who moved a lot of drugs into the United States, he was from the Colombian mafia.

The inside of the prison is like this, like a small town, it has a dining room, which is normal, usually in prisons of this size the population ranges from 1500 to 1700 inmates, depending on the size of the prison. But sometimes you find 2000. There is a lot of overcrowding, and sometimes there are three people in a cell instead of two. The dining room is made to hold two or three hundred people at a time, the prisoners have to rotate unit by unit. Outside, in the open, there is the yard, the outside part with the dining room, a church, a bookstore, the hospital, which is a small place where they give you basic aid so you don’t die; and there is a recreation area, which, depending on the prison, has more or less possibilities for recreation. There are areas where you can play sports, especially handball, which is the most popular game in prison.

Prison life is very difficult, especially day to day life, and the big problem we had, the big dilemma that the five of us decided was how to survive in those prisons, and how to know how to move in them without incorporating the evil things that are continuously manifested, we had to manage not to become like those bad people, full of hate and resentment, because one learns evil or knows of evil in order to survive, and you create habits or ways in prison that you do not want to incorporate later as a human being, because it is very unpleasant, to distrust human beings, things like that which are very typical of prison.

In short, it was very important for us to learn to live together so that we would not get stuck with the bad habits, and it was so important because we had firmly proposed it, we had to come out better human beings than we were when we entered, and that seems to be, but it is a challenge. In prison conditions that is a very difficult challenge, because we had to coexist with criminals, with mafiosi, with mafias, which is very dangerous, we had to know how the politics is, that is, the political thing of the prison. Every time you arrive at a new prison you don’t know the twists and turns it has. You start to see things as the days go by. For example, when you get to the dining room you see all the empty tables, and you think, I can sit at any table, no, you can’t sit at any table, because each table has an owner, because there are several tables that belong to the Mexican mafia, others to the Chicago mafia, to the Italians. So for the Cubans there was always a space, you had to sit at the table of the Cubans, you could not sit at another table because you ran the risk of being beaten up when you left, or they would call your attention, they could even violently assault you for sitting in the wrong place. When you go to the recreation area it is the same, because in the recreation area there are iron tables with chairs, but you cannot sit at those tables because many of them belong to the mafias, for example, around those tables there may be knives buried, or there may be drugs, or it is the place where they go to play cards, they are places that even if they are empty you cannot sit, because the mafia that controls that area prohibits it. When you arrive new, you don’t know these things, only when someone explains it to you, and then you coexist.

Yoga classes

Supposedly I was giving yoga classes, but in reality I was giving martial arts classes to a group of students. We used to meet in a room where the service implements were kept, about two meters by one and a half meters, it had a cement doorway, with a basin of water, where we put everything that got in our way. We managed to get a little sack, a kind of punching bag with sand. We would practice the blows for five or ten minutes, it was quite a hard exercise.

Almost every afternoon we would do some kind of exercise, mostly self-defense, against knives, against blunt objects, immobilization techniques, throwing punches, kicking the sandbag. One day we found out that someone told on us, and a Cuban warned me that we could be sent to the hole, since these practices were illegal, which is why I switched from martial arts to handball, a sport that requires great physical efforts that later affected my health.

The practice of sports in prison was a good experience for us, in my case not only martial arts, but also chess. As a fan of this sport I invested many hours in its practice. There were tournaments in which many times I was the champion, and the prize was very simple, six soft drinks or a small jar with the insignia of the prison I was in, but the most important thing was the intellectual development and spending an entertaining time. Handball also helped to distract me, as long as the condition of my knees allowed it.