Vicente Hernández Brito, who served as a soldier at the San Carlos de La Cabaña Fortress during the early years of the Castro regime, has offered a harrowing testimony about the repressive methods that characterized the beginnings of the so-called Cuban Revolution.
Sick, aged, and forgotten, Hernández recently participated in a tour -featured in a report for CubaNet- where he not only documented the horrors of the firing squad, but also the silent tragedy of those who executed the machinery of terror in the name of a cause, only to be discarded by the same system.
"That's how prisoners were executed."
Vicente Hernández, who is currently 77 years old, candidly recounted how the executions ordered by the revolutionary courts were carried out.
"The first bridge with the cage, when we brought the prisoners to take them to the chapel, to execute them. There, the order was heard: 'Execution officer, carry out the sentence of the Revolutionary Tribunal. In the name of the homeland and the people, proceed.' That’s how the prisoners were shot," he recalled with a mix of resignation and trauma.
Everything was meticulously calculated.
"At the second bridge, at a corner, there was a post with sandbags behind it. It was square. When someone was shot, the bullet would pass through and splinter the post," he explained.
He recounted that the spotlights would turn on before each execution, almost always in the early morning, and that the gunshots were heard by all the inmates in their cells.
"The prisoners shouted 'murderer!' when they saw someone being taken to the firing squad," he added.
The ritual preceding death
Before being executed by firing squad, the prisoners were stripped of even their most personal belongings, in a procedure that was as impersonal as it was brutal.
“They would take the belts and shoelaces from the prisoners so they couldn't hang themselves. From there, they would take them down a ladder to where they were shot, down below,” explained the elderly man, hinting at the systematic protocol that stripped men of all dignity.
There was also room for psychological torture. Hernández describes what was known as the saladito, a punishment cell "beneath the water tank, where a drop would fall on your head for hours."
"Twelve hours there would drive you crazy, but you couldn't move or brush away the drop. Hence the name. They went mad," he explained.
La Cabaña: From Prison to Tourist Attraction
With bitter irony, Hernández observes today how La Cabaña has become a tourist site, an attraction for visitors and Cubans alike. But he remembers its true purpose.
"This place was filled with prisoners. Now it’s for tourists, but it was 'bad times from the moment you entered.' It was a terrible place. Nothing good came from being here," he asserted.
Repression did not only target ideological opponents. “Do you know how long they sentenced someone for having a legal possession in foreign currency? Three years. Another person, for having two or three dollars in their pocket, got six years for currency trafficking.”
Pedro Luis Boitel: The Death of a Symbol
One of the most powerful moments of his testimony is the death of the opposition figure Pedro Luis Boitel, a symbol of resistance to Castroism.
Hernández Brito claims he was a direct witness to his final moments: “I was on standby that morning and went up to bring coffee to the infirmary post. And they tell me: ‘The one in there is dying.’”
I asked him, "Pedro Luis?" They replied, "Yes, it's Pedro Luis."
What happened next was forever etched in his memory.
"When he died, I asked the lieutenant for permission to close his eyes. And that was when all the prisoners began to sing the national anthem. They confined us all. No one could move. No one could leave," he recounted.
Decades later, Hernández learned that in honor of Boitel an international human rights award was established, and he says he felt moved upon finding out.
"I was very emotional. I didn't know that recognition existed. It made me proud. I, this old man here, am proud to have closed Pedro Luis's eyes. He died because he was very weak," he concluded.
From regime server to forgotten
Later on, Hernández Brito participated as an "internationalist worker" and was part of the regime's propaganda apparatus.
"To be an internationalist worker, you must undergo military training before going on a civil mission. Here they say that doctors going to Venezuela are not military personnel, but in order to work in Angola, for example, I had to train as a soldier."
Today, however, he experiences an old age that contradicts the promises of the Revolution.
"My companions and people come and eat from the dumpsters. This has brought about a radical change, which is not what we fought for," he confessed.
With a broken voice, he acknowledged the misery in which he has ended up: "I thought that when I retired I would be at peace, without problems, with a secure old age: with medicine, with medical care. If it hadn't been for my daughter's help, I don't know where I would be. Probably dead."
And he ended up asking a question that encapsulates the disillusionment of an entire generation: “Is health over or not? Is imperialism to blame for all these things?”
The testimony of Vicente Hernández Brito is a raw window into the inner workings of repression at the beginnings of Castro's regime.
More than a confession, it is a denunciation: not only against the executioners, but against the structure that shaped them, used them, and ultimately cast them into oblivion.
It is also an urgent call to historical memory, which compels us to examine unfiltered the foundations of a system that justified death “in the name of the homeland and the people,” and then entirely abandoned its own "soldiers."
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