Red “Ministry of Fear”

In retrospect of the past Jose' my father-in-law saw in 1962 what we have to worry about today Jose' said "It's Everybody's Battle" -- Ian Jay Germaine With anxiety in my heart, I made my applications for passports. To apply for a passport from Cuba these days is to place yourself in the category of a traitor.

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You are kept under surveillance by the informers of our neighborhood. Your property is immediately seized by the state. You may be tangled in mountains of red tape before the passport is received, if ever. And if you finally do get the passport and go to the airport, you are grilled, searched and intimidated by signs and loudspeakers. The Communists are particularly reluctant to allow laborers to leave the country. After all, Cuba is now a showcase for what communism does for the ordinary worker. They also make it very difficult for a Negro to obtain a passport. Cuba is now supposed to be a paradise for minorities. It is very significant that in an island with more than 2,000 miles of shoreline there are no fish. Could it be that the fish are anti-communist? Of course not. What it means is that fishermen are not allowed to go to sea for fear they might escape from Cuba. Thousands of Cubans have risk their lives escaping in small boats and hundreds have lost their lives in boats swamped by heavy seas or sunk by the boat of the Communist coast guard. It is reported that recently Castro himself directed an attack on one of these boats in a place close to Havana. The victims were a married couple and their four children. Ten of my friends lost their lives in the same way. I was able to get passports for all except my oldest daughter, Martha. The Communist in her case decided to have another of their grim little jokes. The man at the Ministry of State told me, "The revenue stamps on this application for passport is no good. They look falsified. We are investigating." " I am sure they are not falsified," I said "I bought them myself in a government office." "The passport has been sent to the secret police. Come back next week." I returned next week. "The investigation is still going on ", I was told. "Come back in a week." After several such postponements, I said in desperation to the man, "Why does it take so long? What can I do?" He look at me with a cold, cynical smile. "There is a person or the same name a your daughter who is a counter-revolutionary. We must investigate whether your daughter is that person." Martha was 13 years old at that time. I am sure she was neither a revolutionary nor a counter-revolutionary. She was a frightened little girl who wonder what was happening in he world. In this conversation with the Communists at the Ministry of State (more accurately, the Ministry of Fear ) I had great difficulty controlling my emotions. It made me almost physically sick to realize that such men had charge of deciding the fate of other human beings. After three months, the Ministry decided Martha was not, after all, a plotter against the security of the regime. We received the passport.\ When I say that I , took my family to the airport to board a plane to the United States, it sounds very simple and easy. But is was a great stain on all of us. No person leaving Cuba, even by authorized means, could be quite sure that he would not be snatched away by Red militiamen at the last minute and whisked away to one of the prisons where so many Cubans had been put, on false charges, merely to serve as examples to others. We left everything behind us except our clothes. With our luggage and with $5 for each member of the family , we went to the airport We were sent at once to a room to wait with others to board planes to the United States. Occasionally, a hard faced guard would come into the room and take someone away. We kept looking at one and other and drawing closer together. As we sat waiting I thought of many different periods of our life in Cuba. I thought of the poor years and the prosperous ones, the sad times and the happy. But the only really painful memories were those of more recent times when our lives had not been our own to live. I thought , "Cuba--My Cuba! What had happened to you?". And now I remembered the name of the airport in which we were waiting. " Jose' Marti." It appeared that the apostle of Cuban Independence was again showing the way to freedom. As a parting word, the Communists had a placed a large signboard on the airport wall. It read, "All Who Leave the Country Are Traitors." By "traitors", they meant people who had tried to do their duty as citizens, who reared their children to believe in God and respect freedom. We were "traitors" because we had been industrious, because we had worked hard and helped create the national wealth which the regime was now systematically destroying and because we refused to live as slaves. At last it was our time to leave. We were require to declare our money. The man at the desk permitted me to keep $5 He let my wife and Martha keep their money. But as a final tribute , he made my younger daughter hand her $5 across to him. We did not file a complaint. We prayed as we walked hurriedly out to board the plane, and as we waited in our seats to take off I gazed at the faces of our two young daughters. It was hard to keep the tears from dimming my eyes. But they were tears of relief. Near us in the plane I heard the frighten voice of a little boy say, "Where's mama?" I realized he was one of the thousands of children being sent away from Cuba by parents who would rather suffer the pain of separation than let them grow up to the Communists. There came to mind one of the meditations of Ignacio de Layola. "What is the end of the human being? Why was he created?" Certainly his end could not be to live as a slave in a Communist state. More probably the mission of the human creature is to come closer to his creator in a life of decency and freedom. My thoughts were interrupted by he roar of the airplane's engines. We moved forward. I looked out the window. The runway lights slipped past us. We went into the air and left Havana back there in the darkness. (NEXT AND CONCLUSIVE: IT'S EVERYBODY'S BATTLE) Column reprinted with permission of the Long Beach Press-Telegram