Claustrophobia

By: Luis Enrique Perdomo Silva/ Camagüey Television
kikeperdomo@gmail.com

“I am an open window that listens, for where to see dark the life. But there is a ray of light in the fight that always leaves the conquered shade”
Miguel Hernández

I still remember that episode of the popular North American series “CSI” where one of the criminologists was buried alive, accompanied alone of a firearm, journalist's recorder-for if he wanted to leave testament - and a strong light.


While his colleagues looked for a webcam each one of Nick's fatidical instants and a flock of ants prepared to prick him, the voice of its victimary arrived to the sarcophagus in tone of vengeance and threatened to take off the life behind since months the member of the investigating team he had found an evidence that inculpated one of the kidnapper's relatives.

The perverse and brilliant imagination of Quentin Tarantino, one of the scripter of that noted chapter “I am In Sepulchral danger”, he comes me to mind in these moments when the Cuban political prisoner Gerardo Hernández Nordelo remains in a cell of punishment call “the hole”, in the North American jail of Victorville, in California.

Also review Hitler's crimes, when buried alive to many that didn't belong to his race and I think of the deceaseds in the Russian submarine Kursk, the miners from China that lost his life or the history of a Cuban girl that died suffocated in a vault of a bank, when being sleeping after closing that crypt tightly.

Can the inventory of scenes be more comprehensive and more thrilling? Maybe. I admit that the claustrophobia that I enumerate startles me. What men that confinement like Nelson Mandela suffered will say, Miguel Hernández or Orlando Cardoso Villavicencio. What that men that suffered would say, in these same minutes, the own Gerardo, witness of these punishments and anguishes in those that this physical and psychological freedom is run over by his jailers.

When we listen this antiterrorist's name, inmerse in an appeal process (Habeas Corpus), let us remember the dimensions two meters long and a meter wide of that cell where remains wrongly. There, to more than 35 grades celsius of heat and with delicate situation of health, shares with another prisoner that darkness where “ lacks the space and the laugh has collapsed.”

It is said easy, declarations are read, silences are listened. But Gerardo lives the torture in flesh and blood. As the character of “CSI Las Vegas”, also to him can end the oxygenate and the patience. As the Nick that Tarantino wrote in the fifth season, he is also victim of a carefully planned vengeance.