Holiday in Cuba

So I am provided with everything I need here. They feed me. I am allowed outside for an hour a day. During this time I am sometimes able to talk to others here like me. It is strangely beautiful in this place. But the heat is unlike anything I experienced in my home. And the outfit I am forced to wear is brightly colored orange. It is the color of unhealthy dung. Or carrots.

We grew carrots in the garden of my home.


I have been here for over four years. My feeling is that God has visited this upon me for not behaving. I knew there were times when I was less devout, I did not realize that the punishment would be so harsh. There was a time when it became pointless to live and so I decided that I would stop eating. This was the only positive action I had left to take. (Were I a more educated man I might say that this was the only agency I had in my life.) We all need this agency. To live without it is not to live.

This behavior was not met with approval. A number of us had decided that to die was better than to be animated in this state. We stopped eating. When we became too weak to stand we were placed on litters and strapped down. A tube was forced into my nose and fed into my stomach. Food was flushed down this and I could not vomit it up. This is how broken we all are, how completely dominated we have become. We do not even have the power to starve ourslves to death.

It started when I bought a car to act as a taxi for the foreigners who wanted to poke at the rubble of my country and my countrymens' lives. One night I was driving by the compound of the foreign army, The Americans. My cab was stopped and I was taken out and restrained. I was about to be married before I bought that cursed car. Now I am here.

They say it is the tropics, that this country is a workers paradise. I want only to find my paradise, and yet even the thin trail I saw to get me there was closed off. Now I simply wait in these breezes and let the sun and the palm trees and the sand glare at me. My beard will grow only so long and then they will cut it. I cannot even remember being happy or human.