Exile in White

At ninety, Miguel leads something of a spartan life inside his white-walled apartment. All his bedroom contains is a twin bed and a chair; the adjacent living room, a small TV and a recliner that's worn around the armrests. On top of an empty bookshelf is the only object he was able to bring with him from Cuba besides the clothes he wore—a small black-and-white photograph of his mother, Conchita.

Growing up, Miguel had a complicated relationship with his father. "He always bossed everybody around," he says, "and he would yell at my mother if there was no food ready for him whenever he was hungry." Conchita was the good housewife, the endlessly devoted mother. When Miguel was sent to prison, in Pinar del Rio, she alone would make the two-hour trip from Havana once a week to see him, bringing ropa vieja with white rice and patacones to cheer him up.

Of life in prison, he recalls how "they woke you up at four o'clock in the morning. They gave you a little bit of sugar water and bread. And then they took you to the fields." They harvested in groups of four, cutting and piling up the cane. "If you didn't get to the end, you didn't get food." To this day he's haunted by vivid memories of cutting down sugarcane stalks eight feet tall, for hours on end.

Miguel was fifty-two when he was released, the last name on a list of 2,500 political prisoners freed during negotiations between the Castro and the Carter administrations. During his seventeen years of forced labor, he tried to escape six times, and was beaten each time he was caught. At night, he is a witness to those beatings in images that play over and over again until they startle him awake. He writes down the details, often turning them into poems. "What happens in life is something that you don't understand," he says. "I escaped prison six times, and people would ask me: 'Miguel, why do you escape, if you know it'll be hard for you to get out of the country?' You might think it's crazy, but I enjoyed escaping."