 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Back
|
Ramon Liceas Frias
By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN, Times Staff Writer
"Wait a minute," said a tearful aunt. "I have something that belongs to you." She handed him a thorn. Liceas had plucked it from an Ayua tree in 1961 while on patrol in the Sierra Maestra, watching for forces of Fidel Castro, who had swept into power two years before. Liceas used a pocket knife to carve the thorn into the form of a boot, the kind he wore while fighting Castro. He put it in his pocket before Castro's 18,000 men surrounded Liceas and 100 others. When Liceas went to prison, guards gave his clothes -- and the thorn -- to his aunt. "She said, 'Take it as a good-luck charm,' " Liceas recalls. He left Cuba, he says, because the possibility of more detentions had become too worrisome. "When I was in jail in the '60s, I was young and strong. But at this stage of my life, if I went to prison, I would die," he says, tapping on the table at a diner near his house. "I knew with one of those detentions, I wasn't coming out." Liceas doesn't blame the Castro regime for locking him up that first time. "They had the right to jail us because we had risen up against the powers of the state," he says. "I felt that the sentence was not unjust. The unjust thing is that a political prisoner doesn't have any rights." Liceas got few visits from his family during his five years in prison. Guards once beat him so badly with rifles and bayonets that he couldn't walk for 15 days. Liceas had supported Castro before taking up arms against him in 1961. As part of the "urban militia" of the small eastern town of Campechuela, he had even spread leaflets against the Batista regime. "As a poor man, I had faith in the future," he says. "If someone comes and promises me through struggle they are going to change my life, I will follow those ideas." After prison, he returned to the bakery where he had worked to support his wife and kids. As sons and daughters of a former political prisoner, his children were marked, he says, their entrance to college blocked. Liceas attended a support group of former Cuban political prisoners in New Port Richey last year. It gave him reassurance that he's not alone. "The impact prison had on me was for the rest of my life. There were many years I kept dreaming I was still in jail," he says. "In Cuba, any time you commit an act against the state, you're pretty much in prison all the time, even when you're on the street."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
Headlines From the Times local news desks |
