Ana L. Rodriguez was a medical student when she was sentenced to 30 years in jail followed by another 30 years of home confinement. She served 19 year and is now a physician living in Miami. The entire story of her experiences and her remarkable courage can be found in her book "Diary of a Survivor "(1995), New York: St. Martin’s Press.
In the middle of that marathonic life consisting of months, and months, and months without family visits , without letters, a life of hunger, of beatings, and of isolation cells they were prone to say to us: “Why, in the world do you keep this up? Don’t you realize that the world does not know that you are here? Don’t you realize that the world believes us and not you?”
These people were trying to eliminate us. They were sitting in front of us, telling us that they could kill us and that nobody in the world would find out. And when we thought about it we realized that what they were saying was totally true… We did know that the United Nations were criminal accomplices of the regime, because they did receive the news of what was going on in the political prisons of Cuba and they did nothing.
So, I asked myself one day: “Ana,why do you continue this? Why do you keep standing up, not bending to their demands? Why don’t you “confess,” ask for their forgiveness, go on your knees?” Soon I hit on the enlightening answer: I was behaving as I was, I was resisting for my HUMAN DIGNITY. And if I was doing what I was doing for human dignity, there was no way that they could crush me, there was no way that they could make me succumb. In that moment of revelation, I felt liberated. Inside prison, inside a country that lived on its knees, I was free. After that, my relationship with the prison guards felt quite different: I saw myself as the victor and I saw them as defeated.
For example, it came a time when they apparently felt compelled to reduce the penal population. They released the older inmates; they released those who were sick. They also released those who they had been rendered harmless by their various psychological and physical tortures.
Those of us who were left were put in a jail where the grounds were surrounded by a circular fence. The daily regime got even more ridiculously strict. If one got closer than about 20 meters to the fence, this was interpreted as “intention to escape.” If one got close to a tree, even if it did not have any fruits, this was interpreted as “intention to steal fruits.” If one answered something said by a guard, this was interpreted as “disrespectful behavior.” That is, it was a regime in which just about everything was severely punishable.
What were the punishments? The favorite was suspension of the one-every-six-months family visit; or suspension of the one-every-six-months letter from home. Thus, one single “demerit” meant one whole year without visitations or without letters from home.
I considered what to do for three whole days and then arrived at another revealing epiphany. Since I was serving a 30-year jail sentence to be followed by another 30-year home confinement, I decided that I would accumulate more punishable demerits than the time I had left in my sentence. I started a daily habit of shaking the bars of my cell and screaming at the top of my voice: “I have the intention to escape!” “I have the intention to be disrespectful to the guards!” “I have the intention of stealing fruits from the trees!” “Are you keeping track? I have the intention to escape!!!”
After about a month of this, I requested to be taken to the office of the Director of the Prison because I wanted to write a statement to the Ministry of the Interior. Maybe out of curiosity as to what I was going to write after this month of “strange’ behavior on my part, I was taken there. I wrote a simple statement. “I hereby declare that I am renouncing, forever, all family visits, all letters, all packages of food”
A couple of days later a few high ranking functionaries went to see me. They tried to convince me that what I was doing was dangerous for my psychological well being and was unfortunate for my family. I then realized that I had just won a hand in the card game and I began to raise the stakes: “Listen guys,” I told them “I have come to the realization that this is a system constructed over many, many punishments and very little rewards. Once I give up all opportunities for rewards, I have also taken away your punishments. You cannot punish me any more. I am totally free”
“You yourselves are all afraid,” I kept telling them “You can be punished. But you cannot punish ME anymore, you lost that faculty, because you cannot reward me with anything. You have nothing to offer me. I don’t want anything from you”
About three days later, the whole system of strict, high frequency punishment was suddenly stopped. The circular fence around the yard was torn down and things eased back to their normal harsh, but not hellish state.
My realization that I was fighting for my HUMAN DIGNITY gave me inner peace. It did not matter anymore if they beat me up out of their own fear. I was free and they were not. I had something that nobody could take away from me: I had my HUMAN DIGNITY