Yoandris Gutiérrez Vargas

“He said: ‘Did you see? If you want to continue like this, well, keep going to Holguín [city in Cuba], but you will arrive dead.‘ I did not answer, because I was already feeling quite bad from those beatings. My vision at this time was like in a fog, I felt dizzy and I was in a terrible pain. And at this moment he gave me my backpack back. I opened it and see that my phone and memory were still there. I said: ‘Well, what a miracle, I thought you were going to steal things as you always steal from us.‘ Then he replied to me: ‘There was no need to do this now.‘ I told him: ‘Good.‘ And he told me: ‘You can go now.‘ I was surprised: ‘You are not going to stop me?‘ ‘No, what they had to do with you had been already done.‘ In other words, he was also mocking me because of the terrible beating and the conditions in which these people had left me. I am sure that he must have noticed the stink that I brought up, as I had urinated and pooped myself because of the terrible pain during the beating. Once they already released me, I walked out of the detention office with the tremendous pain in the rib, in the chest and in the liver. They kicked me so strong, that until today I still feel this pain in my liver.”

“One day I arrived home and I found the Cuban flag in the door, this tiny paper flag that is given to all Cubans in their blocks, in their neighbourhoods or in their communities, so that on July 26, each one places this flag to his house, as is the rhetoric of this totalitarian system. I came very stressed from my work, feeling weak as my body practically had no longer any strength. When I opened the door, I saw the flag on the floor. I remember since childhood, that when the flag falls to the floor, this flag is profaned and must be burned. At that time, I already knew about those 75 brothers and sisters in prison, who were detained in 2003 during the ‘Black Spring‘ [the 75 prisoners of conscience condemned during the protest in March 2003 in Cuba], and in 2006 many of them were still in prison, going through terrible situations. I remember that I left the flag where it was, I continued to seek where my wife put her make up. I took a black paint pencil for her eyes and painted the white stripes of the flag in black. I went outside the house and placed the flag on the frame of the house door and next to the frame I wrote in capital number ‘Freedom for 75‘.”

“That was a deep sadness, the great initiation, that gave me the courage from there onwards to start facing the authorities and the regime of this country. That was on the night when I was already 72 hours home after my detention. I received a visit from a married couple, if I remember the names correctly, Luis Sergio Núñez and his wife Dámaris [active opponents of the Cuban regime], who were by that time leading the ‘Cuba Group‘. And there I began to know, what was opposition about. They asked me to describe why I had been detained and why I had this problem with the Major from the State Security. They knew everything that had happened to me from my neighbour, he already spoke to the couple. That was my first time where I could have a communication with the ‘Radio Martí’. I publicly denounced at ‘Radio Martí’ all the injustice that had happened to me. I committed myself to the opposition, I confirmed that this couple can count on me, because I was an anti-communist and I say it here without lying. I do not regret this decision, even if it can mean my death, as I have been persecuted so many times. I was saying that I would always be an anti-communist and from that moment I was going to fight for human rights in this country, so that to any young man would not happen, what had happened to me.”