Once again, Cuban blogger Claudia Cadelo has proved an extraordinary piece of work, this time an interview with Dr. Suyoani Tapia Maola, the wife of Cuban political prisoner Horacio Piña Borrego:
Q. How did you first meet Horacio in Canaleta prison?
We met for the first time in a punishment cell. It was shocking to me because I wasn’t a doctor in the isolation zone, I was on duty and they sent me to look at Horacio who was feeling ill.
When I entered the corridor there was an incandescent bulb, no sunlight enters there because the windows are blocked with a piece of zinc. It was a huge space, I can’t tell you how big it was -- it’s incomparable -- there were many small cells, extremely small. And there were five there from the Cause of the 75, [from the Black Spring of 2003]: Raúl Rivero, Ariel Sigler Amaya, Luis Milán Fernández, Pedro Pablo Alvarez and my husband, Horacio Piña.
I remember that Horacio had a headache and high blood pressure. When I saw him through the bars it was extraordinary, from that instant the two of us realized something was going to happen. At that time I never thought we would end up getting married, and we would even have a daughter. But it was magical, I have great faith in these conditions, to get to know a person, fall in love there, and to get married and have a family, it really has to be the work of God.
Suyoani and her daughter
Read the whole thing, in two parts, here and here.
En español, aquí y aquí. (Includes some audio recording of the interview.)
Piña is covered by the deal between Spain, the Catholic Church and the Castro dictatorship under which 52 political prisoners are set to be released. However, he remains in the gulag.
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