Fighting Fidel

A loud boom echoes behind you and you feel something sting you somewhere. You’re running, and with each step you take you begin to localize the pain to a specific point on your body— you’ve just been shot in the back. You feel the warm blood pooling on the front of your shirt. Suddenly, another searing hot pain engulfs the right side of your head. You touch it, and there’s more blood dripping from the wound. You hear a friend yell “They got his head!” and you realize that you’ve now been shot a second time. You turn around, and in one blink he drops dead right behind you. You run off pure adrenaline towards thick brush and launch yourself into it for cover. You close your eyes and wait for death, but it never comes. Instead, a vision of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre (Our Lady of Charity) flashes through your scattered mind.

This is how Antonio Garcia, member of the Cuban resistance against communism, recounts the events that landed him in jail. Opponents to Fulgencio Batista, former Cuban president and later U.S. backed authoritarian ruler, the members of the Cuban resistance movement sought to remove the dictator from power. What they least expected, however, was that Fidel Castro would rise from the ruins of the Cuban Revolution to take over as their dictator. As Castro began to take over, properties that the Garcias had owned for more than a century were confiscated by the government. Strictly enforced curfews were put into place. University students forming groups to discuss and resist communism would disappear; they were being executed by the Cuban government in secret.

“No one has ever documented the kinds of atrocities that Castro’s government committed early on when he first began to rise to power. I think a lot of this history will die with us, the people that were there to see it.”

Garcia was part of an unnamed group of known opponents to Castro’s government. When they received word that communist soldiers were en route to detain them and incarcerate them, they hatched a plan. Garcia’s brother advised him and his cohorts to obtain rifles, organize, and flee before soldiers arrived to arrest them. Thus began a 9-day journey across the brambles of Cuba to avoid capture. For the entirety of the nine days, neither Garcia nor his cohorts ate food or drank water. Despite their careful planning and concealed routes of travel, they were spotted by a communist agent that reported them to the military. This lead to 24,000 soldiers actively searching for Garcia and his group.

Once they had been spotted by a group of soldiers, a weaponized conflict began. This conflict resulted in the death of two of Garcia’s cohorts and produced both of his gunshot wounds.

“He looked at me, down at his stomach, which he was clutching to stop the bleeding, and back up at me. He shook his head and said ‘go.’”

As Garcia hid under the brush, floating in and out of consciousness, and his vision of Our Lady of Charity came and went, he froze solid when he heard soldiers approaching. They were so close to his hiding place that if he had reached an arm out, says Garcia, he could have grabbed their ankles. They were idly discussing a movie they had just seen in the country’s capital, Havana.

As they came and went, hours passed until he felt that he was well enough to move undetected. His cue to leave, he said, was a large bird that took flight from a nearby tree, drawing attention away from him. Bleeding profusely from both of his gunshot wounds, he pressed on to his cousin’s house where upon his arrival, his uncle would not be able to recognize him at the door. To prove he was of the same blood, he began to name his family members. As realization flashed on his uncle's face, he was taken inside and hidden. His uncle's wife tended to his nearly fatal wounds. Spiderwebs, pieces of cloth, penicillin powder, and honey were what ultimately helped Garcia’s massive head wound close. Later, a trench was dug beneath the floors of the home to hide the injured man in the event that soldiers came looking for him.

These events occurred across a two-week span that was only the beginning of another twenty years that Garcia would spend fleeing the Cuban military, being captured, tortured in prison, and forced to watch the execution of his wife and children in front of him. He slept on bloodied mattresses in moldy prison cells swarmed with flies. He was barely fed. His greatest hope throughout the entire ordeal was for death. Antonio Garcia wants people to know the history of how communism begins and what its consequences are. He wants to make sure that the gruesome history of his country is never forgotten, so that it may serve as an example for future generations. His story is not finished; he is currently working on producing a documentary about his life with the author of this article, Alina J. Garcia.