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      CONTENTS

      ACKNOWLEDGMENT

      PROLOGUE

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 2

      CHAPTER 3

      CHAPTER 4

      CHAPTER 5

      CHAPTER 6

      CHAPTER 7

      CHAPTER 8

      CHAPTER 9

      CHAPTER 10

      CHAPTER 11

      CHAPTER 12

      CHAPTER 13

      CHAPTER 14

      CHAPTER 15

      CHAPTER 16

      CHAPTER 17

      CHAPTER 18

      CHAPTER 19

      CHAPTER 20

      CHAPTER 21

      CHAPTER 22

      CHAPTER 23

      CHAPTER 24

      CHAPTER 25

      CHAPTER 26

      CHAPTER 27

      CHAPTER 28

      CHAPTER 29

      CHAPTER 30

      CHAPTER 31

      CHAPTER 32

      CHAPTER 33

      CHAPTER 34

      CHAPTER 35

      CHAPTER 36

      CHAPTER 37

      CHAPTER 38

      CHAPTER 39

      CHAPTER 40

      CHAPTER 41

      CHAPTER 42

      CHAPTER 43

      CHAPTER 44

      CHAPTER 45

      CHAPTER 46

      CHAPTER 47

      CHAPTER 48

      CHAPTER 49

      CHAPTER 50

      CHAPTER 51

      CHAPTER 52

      EPILOGUE

      ACKNOWLEDGMENT

      Special thanks and acknowledgment to Jonathan Morgan for his contribution to this work.

      PROLOGUE

      Francisco Garcia Romero’s world had been reduced to two sensations: light and pain.

      The light came from the bare, wire-caged, hundred-watt bulb in his windowless, four-by-eight-foot punishment cell. Always burning, it turned the already sweltering space into a cramped oven, and had long ago stripped Francisco of any notion of the time of day. It limited his sleep to fitful minutes here and there, throwing his arm over his eyes until it cramped and he moved, which exposed his face to the harsh glare again. Its brilliance burned into his retinas. The light exposed every mark on his naked body, every bruise, every cut, every mosquito bite, every sore in stark relief, revealing the pitiful shell of the man and father he used to be.

      Emaciated and filthy, he huddled on the dirty concrete floor of his cell in Quivicán maximum-security prison, with no mattress, blanket or even a concrete bed to sleep on. It had been a good day so far, because the hole in the floor where he relieved himself—when he could muster both the energy to do so and the fortitude to handle the pain it caused—hadn’t overflowed yet. Also, he had managed to keep down the cup of watery, unidentifiable soup and handful of rice that had been doled out a few hours earlier. But the rattle of his cell door as it was unlocked meant that time was at an end.

      “¡Número treinta y cinco, salga!” One of the fatigue-clad guards barked the order. Since his detention had begun here, the guards had only referred to him by a number—thirty-five.

      Francisco crawled to the door and out into the hallway, where the two men grabbed him by the shoulders and yanked him to his feet, ignoring his whimper of pain as his shoulder was wrenched back. They placed him against the wall and searched him—a seemingly useless gesture, since he was already naked, that was meant to humiliate and further degrade him. Francisco waited with his legs apart, wondering which pair would accompany him this time. There was only a casual inspection of his buttocks today, so it must have been Guards Three and Four, as he called them. The other pair of guards, One and Two, took an unpleasant interest in certain parts of his anatomy, and used every opportunity to torment him with the ends of their batons or other items.

      Satisfied he wasn’t carrying any contraband, the two guards pushed him down the hall toward the interrogation area. As he did every time this happened, Francisco whispered his usual litany:

      “Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos,

      Santificado sea tu Nombre.

      Venga tu reino,

      Hágase tu voluntad,

      En la tierra como en el cielo….”

      He always tried to finish the Lord’s Prayer before being silenced by one of the guards or entering the interrogation room. If he could do that, he believed it gave him the inner strength to resist whatever they had planned for him. And just like every other time he had been taken to these small rooms, a part of him wondered if this time he would break under the endless torture, and tell them everything he knew.

      As he shuffled down the hallway, he tried to ignore the flashes of pain from his battered body. Everything hurt, from the deep throbbing of his improperly-healed shoulder, injured in his very first interrogation and beating, to the burning pain in his rectum from the near constant diarrhea combined with torn sphincter muscles and the resulting infection from when he had been sodomized a few weeks earlier. The assault hadn’t come from the guards, but from an enforcer for the “prisoners’ council”—trustees given limited authority by the warden—when they learned he was planning a hunger strike to protest the inhumane conditions. Those, along with numerous other injuries, were a constant reminder of every minute he spent here, and also what had been stripped from him since his very first night in captivity—not just his limited freedom on the outside, but his dignity, health and free will.

      Ever since he had been rousted from his bed in the dead of night so long ago and herded through a bewildering series of prisons, interrogations, torture and starvation, Francisco had clung to the slim hope that he might be released, or at least be allowed to stand trial for his supposed crimes. But as the days had stretched into weeks, and then months, and he had endured the near daily beatings, the deprivation of basic human needs and other mental and physical tortures, Francisco realized that he wasn’t going to be saved. Unlike others, such as the poet Armando Valladares, who had gained international recognition for the abuse he had endured, Francisco was just one of hundreds of low-level political prisoners trapped in the grinding wheels of the government’s relentless repression of basic human rights—what he had been fighting for every day.

      Now, with his incarceration stretching into its sixth or seventh month—he wasn’t sure exactly how long it had been—Francisco had lost hope of ever seeing the outside world again. He hadn’t seen his wife and son in at least three months, and wasn’t even sure they knew where he was anymore, since he had been moved several times before ending up at