been used three days earlier. After 30 days in jail he was released, but his passport and US documents have been confiscated and he has been told that he will never be allowed to leave Cuba again.
“This is a nightmare,” Bernardo said in Havana. “I feel as if I were in prison. This is revenge. They know that to live in this country is so bad and depressing that that is the punishment. The immigration officials said to me, ‘Your brother left, so you stay here’. I don’t feel I committed a crime. I helped my brother become a free man.”
Bernardo now spends most of his time in his brother’s Havana home, with Fidel’s wife and son. The only contact he has with Angela Marie, his daughter, is a home video of her that he brought to Cuba to show her off to the family. He made another attempt to leave Cuba last month, by raft, but it capsized and he had to swim seven miles back to shore. “I’m not as young as I used to be,” he said.
Leave a Reply