Interviews with Ariel Sigler Amaya

My arrest took place on March 18, 2003 in the so-called Black Spring when there was a wave of arrests in Cuba. 75 other people were arrested between the 18th, 19th, and 20th of the same month. According to the government, we were leaders within certain political movements or parties that existed in the island. They wanted to eliminate the internal counter-revolution that was forming in Cuba, so they decided to incarcerate these 75 people simply – nothing more — for the crime of thinking, for the crime of claiming their rights.

We never picked up a gun, we never assaulted a barrack, and we never killed anyone. This means that our goal was our freedom and to claim the rights of every Cuban to be free, to express their ideas, their opinions, and to be heard and be given solutions. In that moment, as I stated, 75 of us were arrested, 75 innocent people having committed no offense, under severe charges as they proclaimed.They said they were charges against the security of the State — I don’t know if thinking differently and demanding your rights are an offense against State security.

They said we had connections with foreigners and the United States Interests Section in Cuba, and that was a severe offense. But why? Because we had communicated? Because we had direct and close contact with that office that the Castro regime has never liked?

We weren’t only 75 dissidents in Cuba, there were thousands of us, and now there are even more and we continue to grow, but at that time they decided to arrest us and sentence us to long terms, sentences that are not even worth discussing, because if you analyze the list of crimes, we were only committing one: collaborating with a foreign country.

They call you a mercenary because you are getting money and receiving instructions from a foreign country. We have never picked up a weapon, we have never received any sort of ideas from a foreign country; none of that.

What this is, is a method that they use to try to indict anyone or implicate you with certain things to charge you with a crime, a crime that you know is a lie, because in no instance were we doing anything wrong.

The only thing we had for us, the only weapon we had, was our rights and the respect for the free will of Cubans.

Ariel Sigler Amaya was a teacher and an accomplished amateur boxer in his native Cuba. After he began speaking out in favor of democratic reforms, he became one of the 75 dissidents arrested in the Black Spring of 2003 and was convicted of having acted “against the independence or territorial integrity of the state.” In prison he suffered torture and other forms of ill treatment.

By the time of his release in 2010, Sigler’s weight had gone down from 205 to 117 pounds. Once in excellent physical shape, he suffered from a variety of medical conditions resulting from his treatment in prison and his friends and family members feared he was near death. After arriving in the United States, he gradually began regaining his strength and began walking with a cane instead of using a wheelchair.

Sigler remains a vigorous advocate of freedom and democracy, not only for his fellow Cubans but also for others living in countries with totalitarian and highly authoritarian governments around the world.