A protest by artists before the Cuban Ministry of Culture, on November 27 in Havana.Ismael Francisco / AP
In the last month I have gone through four interrogations, three arrests, a kidnapping, an escape from the political police, three or four television programs and several newspaper articles where they defame me, corrections of my biography in the national web encyclopedia, constant rings to my cell phone that function as wake-up calls, several warning calls of I don't know what, and permanent surveillance.
I have seen subjects running behind me as I hastened my pace to, under the first eaves, take shelter from the sudden rain of a leaden December morning, and I have seen them leave just as I left, perhaps a little fed up with that They have been put to chase through Havana that little boy who does not take a bus and prefers to walk everywhere.
Perhaps, before I leave Cuba, if I am allowed to leave, some of these events will be repeated, but in none of them, except in interrogation, can the individual play a moderately active role in the face of the totalitarian roller that seeks to crush him.
That is the reason why people interrogated under Stalinist regimes have tried to develop a methodology of the interrogated, although perhaps saying methodology is an exaggeration.
Rather, it is an endearing advice manual that tries to persevere as a historical memory.
A cup of tea with my interrogator
is a text by the Czech dissident and writer Ludvik Vaculik that a close friend gave me to read in a prophylactic way so that I would understand what could befall me after joining the protests in the San Isidro neighborhood for the arbitrary imprisonment of the young black rapper Denis Solís.
There Vaculik tells how uncomfortable and cumbersome it becomes to deal with the affable treatment of the oppressor, that kind of violence filtered through seemingly insignificant benefits.
In my case, the solicitous offer of water or other liquids, the dishes of food diligently served (that matters to me zero), the concern of the agents for the state of health of the family (mental health that they themselves seek to damage to break you for there), the date of publication of your next novel, congratulations on your literary successes, in short, the VIP repression.
“Unless you've been through this, you wouldn't believe how difficult it is to avoid answering polite questions.
Not only is it against natural instinct not to respond, for one's good manners, but it is also difficult to stand firm because it is hard on the ears.
For a newbie it is almost impossible, ”says Vaculik.
***
Apparently smart, I understood in my first interrogation that
A cup of tea ...
probably had not done more than describe
myself
in situation, instead of preparing to raise some kind of more or less novel defense, although the mere fact of assuming an idea is ridiculous So.
I want to believe that I was ironic, elusive, reluctant, and that I constantly stressed the correctness of the words.
Orthopedics for Newspeak scoliosis.
If they asked me if I was going to commit some kind of counterrevolutionary action (I am using exactly their syntax), I would say no, of course, who would think of such a thing?
There they understood, by my tone, the manifest disregard of their semantic norms.
They would then try to counteract, but that immediately became a hodgepodge of misunderstandings that ended up exhausting both parties, until we moved on to other topics of interest to them.
I understood what "hard on the ears" meant in Vaculik's text.
Although I believe I have kept myself in a sparse area, I had something to say.
"What did you think of the conversation?" They asked.
I felt bad.
It wasn't a conversation, it was an interrogation.
They replied that I did not know what an interrogation was, as if suggesting that there were much worse encounters.
It didn't matter how friendly they were at times.
The nature of the event was itself violent, and cordiality, to the extent that it just tried to cover up that fact, made everything even more uncomfortable and unnatural.
This is how it feels when the power that wants you bad treats you good, I thought.
"You have seen that we have not hit you, that we have not harmed you," they said.
I laughed.
"That is not a merit," I replied, "it is not."
I went to the bathroom a couple of times, I did not take a bite and I had water to drink.
They released me after a while.
From then on, no interrogations followed the same procedure, nor did they have the same results.
***
The second time I was quiet for four hours.
I had been forcibly locked up in my family's house for many days.
As they did not put me in prison, they had brought the prison to me.
So I protested and they arrested me.
I ended up in a transit office, sitting in a school chair, with my head leaning against the wall.
A lean man was filming my silence with a Leica camera, he looked like the cameraman at a quinceañera.
His boss asked me if my family already knew that I had ties to Miami terrorists.
I spat out a laugh.
He also mentioned my dead grandfather, my mother's illness, and the free studies he had received at the province's high school.
At some point, they ordered the cameraman to turn off his Leica, then he put it on the current and asked me to collaborate once and for all.
His wife called him on the phone because the food was already served and it was going to get cold.
He replied to hold on a little longer.
I didn't answer any questions, I didn't give in to any emotional blackmail or flattering or ridiculous threats, and I only opened my mouth when they told me they were removing the police surveillance from my front door.
I thought then that silence was the way.
But Vaculik warns on this matter: "The worst of all is that it is not good [not responding] for the relationships between the parties involved, because the rift that is created is often insurmountable."
I checked it right away, on the third questioning.
***
That day I was unexpectedly summoned by phone to the police station on Seventh and 62nd streets, Playa, Havana.
I was so sure that I had done nothing, that is, that I had done nothing even within the terms of the political police, not the terms of the law, that I made a huge mistake.
I went on my own.
No official summons or anything.
I thought it was a formality.
Two nights before, he had gone out to a bar with friends and strangers, some from the San Isidro Movement, others who had participated in the November 27 demonstration and conversations with officials from the Ministry of Culture (both groups, main targets of the political police) , and people who did not belong to one or the other.
But it turns out that there was also a Mexican, or a gringo, or a Mexican gringo.
At this point I still can't say where it was from, and if they put it in front of me now, I wouldn't be able to recognize it either.
The man introduced himself and spoke to me for two seconds.
He said he was an artist.
He asked me for a photo and I think I agreed, even though I was half drunk and I don't even remember much.
The guy seemed cool and wanted to talk, but I can't stand it when people come to talk to me about Cuba, because it's as if they took their newly bought toy to the mechanic so that the mechanic could explain how it works.
If you bought it, start it on your own, that has no guarantee.
Quick zafe and continued on with mine.
I never saw it again.
However, since I spend a good part of my life in Mexico, and as a foreigner is always for the political police a destabilizing agent, an envoy of evil, something as exotic and terrifying as an extraterrestrial, they apparently linked me with that subject, with that crime.
They said that the man had given a cell phone to the artist Luis Manuel Otero, and that he had plans that I was unaware of.
In a globalized world, Cuba thinks by country.
There is also the possibility that State Security imagines Mexico the size of Pinar del Río, a place where the Mexican gringo passes me every day in the only available supermarket in town.
They asked me obvious questions that I knew they knew.
There you should not be silent or lie, because later, when they ask you questions whose answers you really do not know, like, let's say, what that Mexican gringo was doing in Havana, they will think that you are either being silent or lying conscientiously.
None of this worked either.
From a certain point I decided to shut up again.
I said I wasn't responding anymore and I didn't.
Perhaps they were enraged, perhaps they already had the outcome planned beforehand.
How do you know?
The result was that they kidnapped me and that same afternoon they transferred me against my will to my family's town, 150 kilometers from Havana.
***
In the last meeting my parents also participated, and there I spoke basically so that they would listen.
We were only greeted by the chief interrogator, who did not appear from the first summons, but always pulled the strings.
He tried to explain to me why I had been transferred against my will to my family home.
He left his cell phone outside the room and asked us if we brought ours.
He had already told me before that they did not film or record anything without consent.
After we both fell silent, without reaching any agreement on the point that certain individual rights can be taken as provocations that deserve punishment, he wanted to hear what my parents had to say.
Each one asked, less words plus words, that nothing happen to me, and the conversation gradually faded until I got stuck in the bathroom and the chief interrogator opened the door for me with a conspiratorial affection.
***
My experience, although it pales in the face of the long history of interrogations that dozens of Cuban journalists, activists, artists, dissidents and politicians have, tells me that there is no single route or method in the face of a repressive mechanism that seems less changeable than it is.
Some old wolves, to whom you must inevitably listen, suggest: "Don't talk, don't talk, don't talk."
I have doubts, especially because such a thing is never going to happen completely, and because the political police also control and reset the silences in their field of representations.
From preverbal second lieutenants to energetic generals, from houses in the posh neighborhood of Siboney to smelly offices in Alamar, from routine check-ups to surprise arrests, the dramatic arc of interrogations forces us to read the context imposed on the kind of defendant that we are that day. .
The debate in Cuba has gained momentum in recent days after national television has published rude disqualifying materials from the non-state press, in which they use openly manipulated images of journalists filmed without authorization.
It is not known what is the course of the talks or the questions that precede the edited answers of the colleagues, but their bodily expressions reveal the arbitrariness, pressure and fear to which they are subjected at that moment.
It occurs to me, to make it difficult to cut off the words spoken by those questioned, to introduce into our parliaments a kind of annoying tagline, repeated mechanically.
Namely: "My name is ... Down with the dictatorship ... Carlos Manuel Álvarez ... Down with the dictatorship ... and I was born in Matanzas ... Down with the dictatorship ... in the bosom of a family ... Down with the dictatorship ... humble."
As an interrogator, I am not against not speaking, but as an interrogator and a spectator, I believe that the only impregnable position in the face of disqualification and public exposure of other citizens is the following: "Not believing, not believing, not believing."
Only that collective method takes pressure off the victim.
Otherwise, we give in to the divisive discussion that such materials seek.
Who spoke more or less ?, or who reported and who did not ?, when in reality there is no crime where there is no crime.
Even if a friend appeared on television tomorrow, denying me in an interrogation, why think that he is telling the truth?
Why not think that he is trying as hard as he can, or that he is not even in control of what he says?
In fact, I would be the one who lacked friendship, what Agamben calls the constitutive form of the political, if I did not allow a friend to deny me to the political police, in the event that he needed it to get rid of their presence.
Surely like everyone who has been questioned, in recent days I have thought about what will be in my videos.
It has been many hours, who knows how they could use them?
I remember, in the first interrogation, having for a moment the overwhelming awareness that I was being filmed.
Of course they are always filming you, but it was as if in that second they were filming me more than ever.
One of the interrogators, a rather clumsy one, asked me if I really believed that Iliana Hernández, a tireless activist, was a journalist.
He was looking for complicity, for me to say: "no, of course, what a journalist is he going to be, a journalist am I", or something like that.
Hernández, one of the strikers from San Isidro, is a marathon runner who laughs when they organize repudiation rallies in front of her house.
I met her personally when I joined the strike headquarters in November.
I didn't answer that time, and I had the strange epiphany.
My questioned face on television, saying things that I did not say, as later, in effect, happened to close colleagues, and as from now on it may happen to anyone.
There are also, in those propaganda audiovisuals, imperial eagles and dark music flying over our images of mercenary reporters, and the official organization of the professionals of the Cuban press has even suggested jail and sentences for us.
If what television says does not have any real weight, then we should not care how they present us.
The interrogations speak for the regime;
for journalists, their work.
