Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe

STANDING UP FOR A GOOD FRIEND

It's been more than 12 years since I've met Alexánder Podrabínek who, like the majority of his namesakes in his country, Russia, is known better among his friends as Sasha. In that time I was still free. It was before the arrest of Grupo de los Cuatro [Group of Four].

For the first time he came as one of many, following the steps of solidarity, together with a daughter of heroic Poland, Irena Lasota. Thanks to my knowledge of the language of Pushkin, my relationship with Podrabinek became very cordial. Since he didn't know Spanish I used to serve him as a translator.

Our almost everyday contacts during his sporadic stays in Cuba gave me a chance to know some details of my Russian friend's biography. I found out that when he was young, during the time of Soviet stagnation, he was conscious of a common repression that the communist government used to place on its citizens through the abuse of psychiatry.

He started working as an ambulance driver pushing a stretcher. That's how he got into mental hospitals in Moscow. All the detailed information he managed to gather in that capacity was the basis for his book, published in many languages, which revealed to the world the evilness of a system according to which only a crazy person dare to confront it. Psiquiatria Judical [Forensic Psychiatry], which courageously denounced the use of straitjackets, of electric shock therapy, of the use of antipsychotic drugs or otherwise torturing of political dissidents, became the most documented, objective and irrefutable proofs of Bolshevik practices.

The authorities’ reaction was quick. Young Sasha, a lawful Muscovite, had to live in inhospitable places like Yakutsk and Verjoyansk prisons, the second one on the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere and both situated in the autonomous Sakhalin Republic where minus 50 degree temperatures are normal.

Thanks to my friend Alexander I found out about a very interesting, but cruel characteristic of the Soviet prison cells that he learned the hard way: prisoners alternated days in which they provided food and those not, so eating every two days. It's no wonder he caught tuberculosis.

Thanks to Podrabinek, I have learned about many similarities among totalitarian systems in distant corners of the world despite national, geographic, or cultural differences. As well, I have learned that political prisoners experience international solidarity similarly; for him it used to cheer him up quite a bit during the years he spent in a cell.

I'll never forget the concentration in his eyes while looking at Elsa Morejon, a woman who was telling about the miserable lot of her husband, the doctor Oscar Elias Biscet. I was translating what that incredible woman was telling him about the way in which her spouse was treated. Somehow I was feeling that my translation was unnecessary. When she finished, Sasha told me: you didn't have to translate it; it's incredible how much she can say with her face, her gestures - I saw the same on the faces of political prisoners' wives in my country.

That was the time when our Russian friend was publishing Express-Chronicle, a weekly that used to specialize in information on human rights. Later, economic difficulties forced him to close the magazine and it is when the agency Prima-News was founded. Both used to include a lot of information about Cuba. He asked me to become his correspondent in our country, but my different obligations in the fight for democracy in Cuba prevented me from accepting his offer.

I recommended him Adolfo Fernández Sainz, a very well qualified journalist who knew English so that they could communicate with any middleman. The fierce repressive attack of Primavera Negra [Black Spring] of 2003 put an end to that collaboration, but Alexander Podrabinek didn't forget his correspondent. He organized an International Committee for the Liberty of Adolfo Fernández Sainz. He got the support of other ex-dissidents of the old Socialist Bloc, including Lech Wałęsa and Vaclav Havel. To spread the news, he traveled to Havana where in the eyes of the international press and independent journalists he revealed the work of that act of solidarity.

Afterwards he was unsuccessfully trying to come back to our country on several important occasions. I remember especially in May 2005, the days before the general meeting of Asamblea para Promover la Sociedad Civil [The Assembly to Promote Civil Society in Cuba], Sasha phoned me that time. It was a cryptic call; as an old conspirator he knew that the phones, especially communist opponents, were tapped. A few hours later, I heard that, on the morning of May 20, he was arrested at the airport and sent back to Moscow. That day we had the opening session of the Assembly in which he really wanted to take part in.

All of these memories of the good Russian friend return because now he needs the solidarity he never used to spare. Because of the publication of an article that criticized Putin's regime, he is under a death threat. It should be treated very seriously. We shouldn't forget that today's Russia is a country in which such threats aren't words only, especially if we take under consideration the cases of murder of Anna Politkowska and Natalia Estemirova.

A concise and indispensable statement has been already published and all democrats and human rights' defenders allover the world are showing their support by sending messages to [email protected] with a cc to [email protected]. This way they pretend those threats not to become another "chronicle of a death foretold".

It is right and necessary that all Cuban democrats and all people of good will join in that good cause.

Rene Gomez Manzano
Lawyer and independent journalist

Havana, October 5th 2009