Boniato, the prison where Fidel went on strike

HAVANA, Cuba, Jul 25 (ACN) July 2, 1949 saw the opening in Santiago de Cuba of the Provincial Prison of Oriente, known as Boniato and designed only to store men, including Fidel Castro Ruz and the attackers of the Moncada Barracks, sent there four years later.

In his revealing plea History will absolve me, Fidel himself recounted that on the aftermath of the attack of July 26, 1953, Lieutenant Pedro Manuel Sarría Tartabull surprised a group of combatants who were asleep as they tried to reach the Sierra Maestra Mountains.

Sarría Tartabull saved Fidel's life on three occasions after popular pressure stopped the killing of prisoners and took him to the prison at Boniato, a picturesque mountain village about six kilometers northwest of the city of Santiago de Cuba. In his book Tras los barrotes de Boniato (Behind the bars of Boniato), journalist Alfredo Triay Colomé writes the story of its dungeons, which housed 51 prisoners, including those involved in the attacks on the Moncada and on the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks in the city of Bayamo and where Fidel was kept in isolation and incommunicado for 77 days. However, his revolutionary ideas prevailed all along.

Here’s one of the young lawyer’s most daring and audacious acts:

“...I decided to go on a hunger strike, and I did it without constitutional guarantees, without press coverage, without news, without anything. It was a challenge, an act of rebellion and to some extent of moral pressure, because it was also not a passive, silent strike.”

He pointed out that this relative isolation allowed him to prepare himself to go to court for the trial that started on September 21, 1953, Triay Colomé wrote, quoting Katiuska Blanco’s book Fidel Castro Ruz: Guerrilla of the time. Conversations with the historical leader of the Cuban Revolution.

Francis Velázquez Fuentes, a historical researcher and author of the prologue of Tras los barrotes…, referred to its central theme, an old penitentiary built in the late 1950s: the Provincial Prison of Oriente, which kept in captivity a large prison population that witnessed and suffered bloody events, uncontrolled by the prison staff and totally neglected by the corrupt governments of that time.