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MEN Emilio Adolfo Rivero In leaving Isle of Pines, after twenty months in solitary confinement, imediately after two hunger strikes of seventeen and twenty days, plus eighteen days tied to a bed and fed by means of nasogastrics, my weight was around ninety five to a hundred pounds, and I am five feet nine inches tall, what means that I looked like those pictures of men in nazi concentration camps. In the same condition were Alfredo Izaguirre, Odilo Alonso and Nerin Sánchez, who had participated in the hunger strikes. And in the first evening on our arrival at La Cabana, in Havana, I, together with Alfredito, Huber Matos, Carlo Pedro Osorio Franco, and Luis Cruz was sent to the punishment cells, "las capillas", (the chapels), also used for prisoners about to be executed. In entering the area where the five cells were located, three facing the other two, I was placed in the first from the entrance, to the left. The others had already been assigned to other cells. My cell was the only one with two prisoners. The man with me was blond, medium height, good appearance, and with something soft about him. It didn't take me much time to detect that he was an informer*. But of that, later on, in a separate chapter. Thirty days after our arriving at the cells, all the men were sent back to galleries, with the rest of the prisoners. Only Alfredito and I remained in our respective cells, for another twenty six days. Prisoners used to write on the walls of the cells, and when they didn't have pencils, pens or crayons, they scratched the walls with whatever hard came into their hands. At La Cabana, in those times, prisoners used to write on the walls by using the spoons they received at lunch and dinner times. There were many writings on the walls of my cell, in that spring of 1966, of which I have kept three of them in my memory. One was most of the verses on Psalm 23... "El Señor es mi pastor, nada me faltará.." (The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want..."). It had been written there by a pilot from Santiago, in Cuba's eastern province. His second family name was Losada. I never met him, but I was told that he was a protestant, and at times he preached to his fellow prisoners. He had put his name under the psalm, and by the name some one, later on, had put a cross and a date in 1965, when he had been executed. The second thing I remember was written close to the cell's low ceiling. Only four words, probably one of the last thoughts of a man before being taken to the execution grounds: "Pienso en ti, madre" (I think of you, mother). And the third of the writings I remember, was to me the most beautiful expression I ever read, for, I imagine, it was the last message, the last song of love, the last letter, the last tenderness that a man, perhaps a few hours before being executed, sent to the woman he loved, by means of his mind, a wall and a spoon. It read: "Gladys, mi amor" (Gladys, my love).
*Gerardo Eloy Dulzaides Ojeda
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