Robert Cox: Dancing on Fidel’s grave

More recently, it has not been some far away foreign capital but the streets of Miami where Cubans turned Called Ocho into an impromptu block party, celebrating the promise of Fidel Castro’s long-awaited death.

As I watched the televised coverage, I could not help but think of a trip to Florida last summer when I took my family to dinner at Café Versailles, the unofficial capital of Little Havana.

My wife’s parents fled Cuba in 1961 and a meal at Versailles was about as close to Cuba as she was willing to go to give our children a taste of their ethnic roots.

It was in Versailles, over too many cups of Cuban coffee, that I first heard “Eduardo” tell me his story of life under Castro.

A story that Oliver Stone and other Castro apologists would do well to consider.

I called him recently to hear it one more time.

“I was a full professor at the University of Havana. By 1968, I had enough of Castro’s system and decided to leave Cuba.

You were not allowed to apply for a passport if you had a job, so I had to quit first then wait for permission to leave.

The school officials told me that I could not resign but that I would be fired if I did not withdraw my request. I said no.

At a compulsory meeting of faculty and students, I was denounced as a traitor and expelled.

I was kept in limbo — unable to leave, unable to work — for two years.

Then, in 1971, security forces came to my house. I was charged with ‘vagrancy’ and taken at gunpoint to a forced labor camp 50 miles outside of Havana.

For six weeks, my wife and children had no idea what had become of me.

I was made to work in the fields from dawn to dusk. We had little food and what we had was disgusting.

I stole potatoes and corn from the fields and ate them raw.

I ate grass and plant leaves for fiber and vitamins.

When a knife fight broke out in the food line, the man ahead of me was stabbed many times.

In the commotion, I stepped over his body and ate two servings of food.

That was a good day.

Fifty men shared one open water pipe for drinking water and bathing.

One open hole was the toilet. We were so desperate to get the filth off us that we bathed in irrigation ditches.

One of the jobs at the camp was to put parathion on crops.

I knew parathion, an insecticide, entered the bloodstream through the skin, mouth and nose causing poisoning, blackouts, and death.

We were made to spread the parathion with our bare hands, breathing in the powder as we worked.

Every day the guards pointed guns in my face, hit me and shouted “traitor,” “vermin” and “parasite.”

They told me I would not be released until I renounced my desire to leave Cuba but that if I did I might get my old job back.

I told them they would have to let me go or kill me.

After years of not knowing how long this would go on, my wife received a telegram from the Interior Ministry in the fall of 1973 saying that I was allowed to leave the country.

She brought the telegram to the camp and I was released.

I don’t know why they let me go. I think part of it is that after five years they realized they were not going to weaken my resolve.

I also became less useful to them as my condition worsened.

I went from 180 pounds to 142 by the time I left Cuba.

I later learned that a woman from the government wanted to live in my house.

Maybe that was the reason. When I left, she moved into my house.”

“Eduardo” made it to the United States. He is retired now, after a long and distinguished career as a chemical engineer.

He raised his family and lived a good life. But his voice on the phone betrayed his emotion; those lost years in Cuba may as well have happened yesterday.”

I asked him if he had gone down to Versailles to celebrate.

He told me “no,” that he wouldn’t be celebrating anything until he was dancing on Castro’s grave.

Robert Cox is a member of The Examiner’s Blog Board of Contributors and blogs at WordsinEdgewise.tv.