Now that the passions of spring campus demonstrations have subsided, some of the students who spent last semester protesting their universities’ investments in corporations doing business in South Africa should look at human rights violations closer to home. The recent testimony of the first American political prisoner released from Cuban jails provides quite a startling picture of a Western Hemisphere Gulag.
Frank Emmick, a 63-year-old American businessman imprisoned in Cuba for 14 years until his release in January, has given an eyewitness account of heroic physical and spiritual endurance in the face of prolonged brutality. Unfortunately, few seem to be interested in his story.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Emmick engaged in the innocuous business of freezing and exporting frog legs from Cuba to the United States. When this country broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961, he suspended production. Then his troubles began.
Emmick was harassed and arrested several times and asked what he knew of the coming “invasion.” Although he had no knowledge of any invasion, his home was entered at midnight by five Cuban militiamen who beat him savagely and threw him into the ocean for dead. After he survived that ordeal, he was forbidden to leave Cuba.
Two and a half years later, Emmick was thrown into a Cuban dungeon on the trumped-up charge of being the chief of the CIA in Cuba. After months of typical Communist-style interrogations, occasionally witnessed by Russians or Czechs, Emmick was tried in 1964 and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Emmick’s descriptions of life in a Communist prison for political prisoners rival Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s in horror and sadism. Emmick was savagely beaten, kept in solitary confinement in a completely darkened refrigerated room, then packed in a dungeon with 650 other prisoners with practically no sanitary facilities and no room to lie down to sleep.
“Prisoners were jammed like sardines, forced to sleep on an old, poorly cemented floor full of earthen pot holes, rats, vermin, etc., with little ventilation and where the sun, moon, and stars could never be seen,” Emmick said. Captives “Eought for a measly inch of space to rest our bodies.”
Emmick said that there were about 5,909 prisoners in that compound. All those who left went straight to the firing squad. There were 20 to 25 executions a week and as many as 27 in one night. “Among us there were no common prisoners, only political prisoners — men in a71 walks of life from peasants to priests whose only crime was their revulsion of Communism.”
In addition to everything else, Emmick suffered two heart attacks during his imprisonment, and at one point a guard bayoneted him in the side simply because he was the only American prisoner in the fortress. He credits his survival to his faith and to the courage of his convictions.
Emmick was released this year, he said, because “I think [Castro] probably didn’t want me to die on his hands.”
How many political prisoners are suffering like this in Communist Cuba? Emmick estimates that ten years ago there were 100,000, and that at the present time the figure is about 40,000 political prisoners.
Castro’s barbaric treatment of an innocent U.S. citizen is a worthy focus for the energies of American student protestors, and also of the Carter Administration’s campaign for human rights. Emmick says that at least four other American political prisoners remain in Cuba in circumstances similar to his own.
Will campus agitators and Carter Administration orators call for human rights in Cuba? Or will they continue their practice of selective moral accusation?
