Raul Rivero in Miami

The Miami Herald has a great piece on former political prisoner and poet Raul Rivero, who incidentally will be speaking later this week in Miami.

Raul Rivero: A poet unbowed by Cuba's jails

BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO

Knight Ridder Newspapers

MIAMI - (KRT) - For two years, Raul Rivero, a man accused of wielding words as weapons and sentenced to 20 years in prison, sat in a solitary, humid cell so small there was barely room for him to stretch out his arms.

He slept on a metal bed with a thin foam mattress, used a hole in the ground to relieve himself, cleaned up in a spigot turned on only once a day for 15 minutes.

Under the dim light of a single bulb, he wrote love poems - the only thing, his jailers warned him, he was allowed to write.

At first, inspiration didn't come easy for the dissident journalist who founded Cuba's daring independent press and became internationally known for his dispatches about the repression and starkness of life in Cuba.

But then, Rivero says, he let his mind wander back to the "many, many women" he loved, married, didn't marry, lost or left, and he began to eagerly pen odes to "love and ex-love."

"Every time I finished a poem, I felt that they had not defeated me," said the 59-year-old, freed in April and now living in Madrid, where his jailhouse poems were published under the title "Corazon sin furia" (Heart Without Fury).

One of 75 journalists and dissidents accused of "spreading enemy propaganda" and jailed in a sudden crackdown in the spring of 2003, Rivero arrives in Miami on Sunday, his first trip to the United States. He was to deliver a report in Indianapolis on Monday before the International Press Association on journalists still imprisoned in Cuba.

Back in Miami on Thursday, he will appear at a reading at Miami Dade College's Florida Center for the Literary Arts in celebration of his 60th birthday.

"El Gordo" to his friends, Rivero spoke with self-effacing humor during a two-hour telephone interview with The Miami Herald about his old life - "my shipwrecks" - and his new job at the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, where he pens a page on Saturdays.

Born in 1945 in the rural town of Moron in eastern Camaguey province, Rivero moved to Havana as a young man to study at the University of Havana, earning a degree in journalism.

A supporter of the Cuban Revolution and already a poet, he became in 1966 one of the founders of El Caiman Barbudo, the new government's premier cultural magazine. He also worked in the state newspaper Juventud Rebelde and literary magazines La Gaceta de Cuba and Casa de las Americas.

He published two books of prize-winning poetry. Two of Cuba's best poets - Eliseo Diego and Nicolas Guillen, the latter intricately linked to officialdom - were his mentors and personal friends.

"He wrote what was called `civic poetry' in which the homeland and the status of the nation are the subjects, and the language, although metaphorical and poetic, is conversational and reflective of the reality," says novelist and friend Eliseo Alberto, exiled in Mexico City and the son of Diego.

But it was in Moscow, where he served as correspondent for Prensa Latina from 1973-76, that he began to appreciate the differences between Western correspondents who freely reported on events, and the censorship to which his reports were subjected.

"I loved journalism, but I was no journalist at all," he says.

Rivero returned to Cuba to a job "doing public relations" at the Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC).

His "long and painful process" of disaffection with the government had begun, Rivero says, "but I was scared to take steps because I knew what happens to those who dissent."

"I was afraid, like everyone there now is very afraid, and that's why the government continues to exist in that great theater that is living in Cuba."

He plunged, he says, into "a stage of self-destruction," resigned from UNEAC, drank heavily and lacked the discipline to do anything more than survive.

Then, in the summer of 1991, inspired by the Soviet collapse, writers Fernando Velazquez and Maria Elena Cruz Varela came to Rivero with a letter addressed to the government that asked for democratic reforms. They wanted Rivero to sign it.

He did, and so did eight other intellectuals. It became the historic "La carta de los 10 (Letter of the Ten)," and it marked Rivero's debut as a dissident. The letter's international furor forced the government to recognize the emerging dissident groups.

Not wanting to engage in political militancy - "I was a fellow traveler of communists, but I've never been a political militant in the party or youth groups, among other reasons, because I lack the discipline and it bores me," he says - Rivero didn't affiliate with Cruz's group, Criterio Alternativo.

Instead, he turned his attention to his calling: journalism. He founded Cuba Press, a group of journalists who would report on life in Cuba and send their news abroad.

"It was a delirious idea at the time," Rivero says.

Cuba lacked adequate telephone connections, people went to prison for lesser affronts, and the cut-off of aid from the Soviet Union had prompted unprecedented shortages. The journalists lacked the basics: paper, pen, computers, phone lines.

But using diplomatic connections, foreign visitors and foreign press, Rivero began to get his dispatches out, reporting on the dissident movement, on the shortages, on government actions.

El Nuevo Herald, and sometimes The Miami Herald, ran the pieces in Miami. Madrid-based journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner published them in his news service Firmas Press, which serviced Latin America and Spain.

Rivero - until then jobless and living "the marginal life, buying and selling in the black market, stretching a $30 payment for a poem published in Mexico, always risking arrest" - became an internationally recognized writer.

Albeit, a struggling one.

`Whenever a foreign journalist came to interview or visit me and said, `What can I do for you?' I would answer, `Leave me your pen.'"

He and others believe his stature kept him out of prison for 10 years, although he was harassed by police and pro-government mobs, his phone line was continually disconnected and he was detained for days at a time at the fierce Villa Marista in Havana.

"That's the place where they try to rob you of your soul, drive you insane with the tactics," he says.

He didn't buckle.

Then came the unexpected crackdown in 2003, the arrest, the trial in which he got to see his lawyer only minutes before the proceedings began, the government's case claiming his journalism was "at the service of the United States against Cuba," the harsh sentence of 20 years.

The prospect of going to prison, where political prisoners are mixed in with killers to further punish them, was so terrifying, Rivero says, "I was afraid of my own fear. I was afraid of not being able to stand it. Everything is programmed to undo you as a human being."

He endured, and an international campaign for his release was waged.

Through it all, he kept writing.

A lot of it was about "the moral degradation" of Cuban society.

"The old lady from my block who testified against me at my trial gets relief packages from her sister in Miami," Rivero says. `I used to tell my wife, `Look at her, she's getting her chocolates so she can have the energy to persecute me.'"

Then, in a more serious tone, he adds: "The material reconstruction of Cuba will be easy. All it takes is money and everybody knows where the money is - Miami. But the bigger problem is going to be the spiritual reconstruction of a nation that has been surviving by lying all day long and stealing from the only rich entity - the government."

Six months into his exile, Rivero is a sought-after source on Cuban affairs - and on the 26 independent journalists who remain in prison in perilous health.

He was in Switzerland on Wednesday, where he made public appearances and met with some of the 1,700 Cuban exiles living there.

He came home to a house full of journalists wanting to interview him before he left for Miami.

"We can't wait to get to Miami," he says. "It will be a sentimental trip, like going to Havana."

Besides his job at El Mundo, Rivero is finishing a manuscript, "Vidas y oficios" (Lives and Occupations), mostly testimonials inspired by stories he heard in prison.

The collection of love poems - whisked out of Cuba while he was still in prison by Rivero's wife, Blanca - are a hit.

"It's a very special book because it was edited by the police," Rivero quips.

Before he could give the poems to his wife during her visits, allowed only once every three months, Rivero had to hand his poems over to the prison guard assigned to him for his approval.

He would hand in 10, Rivero says, get seven back.

"He always felt obligated to censor something," he says.

Then he laughs: "It didn't matter. He censored the silliest poems."

Posted by Val Prieto at October 11, 2005 08:00 AM

Comments

Posted by: Howarde at October 13, 2005 11:34 PM