Saturnino Rafael Hidalgo stood naked in front of his grave.
Fidel Castro's soldiers had given him a pick and shovel and told him to dig. When he had dug a foot into the ground of Cuba's Sierra Maestra that night in 1961 above his village of Campechuela, they told him to stop.
"You can fit there," a lieutenant said.
Hidalgo turned around. Blood still trickled down his cheek from the bruise of a rifle butt.
"Are you going to talk, or are we going to execute you?" the lieutenant asked.
"Execute me, because I don't know anything," Hidalgo replied.
The sallow light of lanterns lit the 12 soldiers before him with rifles.
"The only ones we want are the Mesa brothers," the lieutenant said. "Are you going to talk or do you want us to execute you?"
"I don't know anybody," Hidalgo answered.
"Get ready! Aim!" the lieutenant called. "Fire!"
An explosion of noise crushed Hidalgo's eardrums. He went deaf. But he was still standing.
"I didn't know if I could feel my body, if I should drop to the ground or not," Hidalgo recalled. "I was like a zombie. I didn't know whether I was dead or alive."
A taste of home
Rays of sun streaked through the oak trees at Tampa's Lowry Park one morning in late April.
Hidalgo and several other men buzzed around picnic benches setting up signs and stereo speakers.
Young children spilled out of arriving cars, running ahead of adults carrying trays of rice and pork. Older men grabbed each other in bear hugs, tears in their eyes.
Two buses pulled into the parking lot from Miami.
Dario Mesa, 72, milled through the growing crowd in his rimmed hat. A man slapped him on the back.
"Here in Tampa, we call him the mayor!" the man said of Mesa.
The town that Mesa "oversees" is his beloved Campechuela, recreated hundreds of miles away in the heart of Tampa.
His family, the one Castro's soldiers wanted so badly 40 years ago, had coordinated with Hidalgo back then to create a network of 300 men to fight Castro's soldiers in the mountains above their homes in Campechuela. Theirs was a small town on the island's southeast coast at the foot of the Sierra Maestra.
But it had a history of rebellion.
A few years before, the farmers and sugarcane workers from Campechuela had supported Castro in those same mountains as he launched his guerrilla battle against dictator Fulgencio Batista. They led cattle up the steep mountain slopes to feed Castro's fighters.
Quickly disillusioned by the 1959 revolution, the lack of promised elections and the seizure of property, they turned against Castro by 1961.
Many of them wound up in prison. What they sought remained elusive to them in Cuba. They and their families found it in Tampa.
"Now I feel okay because I'm in a free country, a democracy," said Hidalgo, 67, who arrived in New Port Richey with his wife and four relatives as a political refugee in September. "It's something we aspired to in Cuba."
The former political prisoners recently cheered former President Jimmy Carter asking for changes. They supported President George W. Bush demanding other political prisoners be freed.
But outside the media's spotlight, in more quiet circles, they have stay tied to each other, their memories and the people they left behind.
They call themselves Municipio de Campechuela en el Exilio: the Municipality of Campechuela in Exile.
While these exile groups are common in Miami, this one is unique in Tampa, said Emilio Vazquez, director of the Tampa chapter for the Cuban American National Foundation, the largest exile group.
Members of other municipios in exile live in the Tampa area, but they don't organize and hold reunions here, Vazquez said. Instead, they travel to Miami for annual festivities. The only other formal gathering in the Tampa area is the annual reunion of residents from Bejucal, a town outside of Havana, he said.
He estimates that there are 45,000 Cuban emigres in the Tampa area.
"I have to say, it's a unique municipio. Those people are really active," Vazquez said.
"There are a lot of people. I make fun of them, I say, "I guess no one else is left in Campechuela. Who's got the key, you know?'"
Members say they number between 200 and 300 in the Tampa Bay area, many recent arrivals in Tampa and Pasco County. Another 300 to 400 live in Miami _ all from a county of about 30,000 in Cuba.
The group writes checks to help new residents from Campechuela get on their feet. It gives monthly stipends to some of the elderly former political prisoners who reached the United States. Some former residents of Campechuela who were political prisoners organized a support group last year in New Port Richey and are talking of forming another.
And with the reunions, they meet just to remember.
On that sun-dappled day in Lowry Park, the second such reunion in Tampa, old men who'd lost their youth to prison cells watched their grandchildren chase each other around fat trees. Teenagers in black pumps and bared midriffs twirled to the jazzy blare of salsa music.
Tears swelled in Mesa's eyes.
"Some people I haven't seen in many years," he said. "The most important part is that we get together. But we always talk about a free Cuba."
Broken promises and rebellion
Many families in the sugarcane town of Campechuela welcomed Castro in late 1956 when his boat, Granma, landed 40 miles away at Los Cayuelos in eastern Cuba.
Castro and 81 heavily armed men had set sail from Mexico, where the rebel leader had fled from Batista.
They came ashore ready to launch their revolution in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra.
The people of Campechuela had high hopes for Castro. They believed he'd bring relief from the oppression of Batista's brutal dictatorship and militias.
"(Batista's paramilitaries) would burn people alive on the edges of town," Hidalgo said. "They would stick nails in their forehead to kill them."
Two of the Mesa brothers joined Castro's rebel army, becoming a lieutenant and captain. The remaining 12 Mesa brothers and sisters, including Dario, helped secretly with supplies.
Hidalgo, who ran a gasoline shop at the time, helped to secretly gather food and medicine to send into the mountains for Castro's men, or to sabotage power lines.
But after Castro swept into power in 1959, the residents of Campechuela saw Castro incorporate Communism into his government. He took control of big and then smaller plots of land. The elections he promised within a year as part of his Sierra Maestra Manifesto never came.
"We didn't want what he did, take the rich and take them to the level of poor people," said Mesa, whose family planted rice and owned a few trucks to haul sugarcane. "We wanted him to take the poor and bring them to the level of rich people."
The family organized again, this time against Castro. They joined a larger network across the southeast tip of the island. Mesa's same two brothers led the local charge, part of 300 men in the region. It was called the Mesa Area Revolt.
"I personally used to take them (guns) in jeeps," Hidalgo said. "I reached a certain point and would take mules to the highest points."
"Shoot on sight'
But someone in their group attacked one of Castro's military headquarters too soon, before the rest of the group was ready.
Castro sent 12,000 men to encircle the Sierra Maestra to rout out the opposition.
"That's when he closed the noose," Hidalgo said.
At one point, Castro's soldiers took Dario Mesa from his home, where he was under house arrest, and drove him to a military command post. They showed him documents with his brothers' names. Next to them, it said, "Shoot on sight."
"If you tell us where your brothers are, we promise not to kill them," the soldiers told Dario Mesa, he remembered.
Instead, with the help of Hidalgo's sister at a rural clinic, the two Mesa brothers hid in an ambulance, wrapped in bandages and disguised as patients. The ambulance smuggled them out of the mountains. The brothers made their way to Havana, where they joined several others in hijacking a bus. They crashed it into the Brazilian embassy and sought asylum.
Eventually, the Mesa brothers moved to Miami, where another brother started the first Municipio de Campechuela en el Exilio.
Dario Mesa, who had been thrown in jail in Cuba a handful of times for several days each, under suspicion of aiding the opposition, flew with his family as refugees to Chicago in 1968. They moved to Tampa, where he started the local Municipio de Campechuela en el Exilio in 1985.
Meanwhile, Hidalgo, along with many of the men from Campechuela, was arrested. After the fake firing squad that temporarily left him deaf, Hidalgo was put in prison from 1961 to 1964 and held for questioning countless times since. Once he was put in solitary confinement for nine days on a cement slab with no roof and no bathroom, under tropical sun.
Recently, former political prisoners and their families started to get out.
"I couldn't stand it anymore," Hidalgo said. "I came because I couldn't stand the oppression against me and my kids."
Scars and painful memories
Mamerto Luzarraga pulled up his pant leg to show off a gouge in his flesh. His son propped the wheelchair behind him in the grass at Lowry Park.
The scar, he explained, came from the failed U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. He fought against Castro.
"I got wounded by artillery fire," Luzarraga said. "The guy next to me got killed."
His brigade of 1,200 lost 200. His black cap bore its name and number, along with the Cuban flag.
Luzarraga, who grew up in Campechuela, spent 20 months in prison. Then the Cuban government traded him and other fighters to the United States in exchange for medicine. He became a citizen, joined the Navy and moved to Puerto Rico.
"That's where I met this girl," he said with a wink, nodding to his wife, who snapped a photo of Luzarraga and his son and daughter-in-law. Now they all live about 30 miles west of Ocala.
Luzarraga surveyed the scene at the Lowry Park reunion from his chair. Older men stood in clusters smoking stumps of cigars as thick as two thumbs. Warming pork sizzled from under the pavilion. The smell of sweet, starchy yucca filled the air.
Luzarraga's eyes went glassy.
"It's very emotional. Sometimes you ask for friends you have, and they say, "He died,' " he said.
As he spoke, Francisco Martinez of Tampa walked over, clad in slacks and a pink guayabera. He bent down and told Luzarraga who he was. Luzarraga grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously as he waved his family over.
"Mi esposa," he said introducing his wife.
"Mi hijo," he said introducing his son.
The two men had grown up together. Martinez, an organizer of an opposition group, spent 23 years in prison in Cuba.
Two months and 60 pounds
Other men crowded around Luzarraga's chair. There was Nelson de los Rios Lopez of Tampa, who first moved to New Port Richey when he arrived in the area a few years ago from Campechuela.
He was imprisoned for seven years in the 1990s when his position was discovered as vice coordinator for the human rights group Movimiento Estudios Martiano, or Movement of Marti Studies, named for Jose Marti, the famed independence fighter.
A former accountant, Rios oversaw 172 square miles around Campechuela, or about 248 people. The group's platform pushed open and bipartisan elections. Members met under the guise of studying Marti's writings. But one member blew their cover to the state security, which arrested Rios. He spent two months in solitary confinement with no sun, little water and old rice. He lost 60 pounds.
As the men reminisced, Luzarraga's son, Mamerto Jr., stood protectively over his father's wheelchair.
"I'm very proud of him," he said.
The younger Luzarraga has never seen Cuba. After growing up hearing his father's stories, he wants to go.
Nearby, a young man the same age couldn't wait to get out.
"Everything is hard in Cuba'
Frank Perez, 23, arrived in Port Richey about a year ago. Like many of the refugees, he and his family arrived through the help of World Relief. His grandfather was a political prisoner and obtained refugee status for all of them.
"Everything is hard in Cuba," Perez said, insisting on speaking a halting English. He was an auto mechanic in Cuba and has found a similar job in Tampa until he can learn the language better.
"The people are good," Perez said. "The system is bad."
Those who are here do their best to help out new arrivals.
"When they come, they go where their families go," said Alonso Felix, 43, a barber from Town 'N Country trying to keep tabs on his toddler son scampering around Lowry Park.
Felix came to Chicago with his family 33 years ago and has lived in Tampa eight years. His old town moved in around him.
"I just met a cousin of mine I haven't seen in 33 years," Felix said. "I didn't know she was here. She came a year ago."
Just the week before, a 27-year-old cousin and his wife arrived from Cuba to live with Felix until they could make it on their own.
Felix pointed to the old pictures of Campechuela's town center posted on cardboard and stuck into the ground. Throughout the day, parents showed the pictures to their children and recounted stories.
There's the old theater, where they no longer show movies. And the old town square.
"They used to play music on Sundays, and if you were a girl, you'd walk around the park," Felix said. "The guys would sit around the edges, and you would meet and end up marrying."
Dario Mesa introduced his brother Abel to a cousin he hadn't seen in 40 years.
"I didn't recognize him!" said Abel Mesa, 70, gripping the man's shoulder.
After a meal of pork, rice, beans and yucca, the group played the American and the Cuban national anthems. Many of the 300 to 400 present clutched their hearts for both. The older men and women sang along to the Cuban anthem.
Once away from the crowd, Dario Mesa, who still works part time in a warehouse to support new arrivals, pledged allegiance to more than just his memories.
"I will continue to fight until the last moment of my life for the liberty of Cuba."
|
