Havana Does Not Believe in Tears

Uria claims it was his editor, Arturo Arango, who had the idea of putting a fool's cap on a photograph of Luis Sexto, a writer for the newsweekly Bohemia. The two men were known to be feuding, and Sexto had previously criticized Arango in one of his columns. Clowns constituted the graphic theme for the entire May-June 1990 issue of Casa de las Americas. Cesar Ernesto, the magazine's art director, had placed drawings and photographs of clowns on every page, a fact the state security agents did not find amusing when the case was investigated almost a year later. To make matters worse for Uria, he finally had a byline in that issue -- on an article that passionately vindicated the work of gay writer Virgilio Pinera.

"'[Uria demonstrates] hostile conduct toward the principles of the Socialist state,'" Uria pronounces, reading from the edict that ended his livelihood in Cuba. "'We do not recommend him for another job with the Ministry of Culture due to his untrustworthiness.'"

After his appeal failed, he sought out jobs at various publications and institutions but was turned down each time. (Meanwhile, Arango, a high-level party member, was given a prestigious job at another publication.) Uria tried to leave the country, applying for visas to Mexico and Venezuela; he also received invitations to writers' conferences outside of Cuba and won a grant for a six-month writing residency in Ecuador. However, he was not permitted to leave the country.

To make money to buy food, Uria resorted to selling his rations of rum and cigarettes on the black market; he supplemented that meager amount with some financial support from his family. With time on his hands, he began to write essays that analyzed the Cuban government and the contradictions of the Cuban psyche. He also wrote fables, animal stories that were cynical allegories for human behavior. Most of the intellectuals and academics who had courted his friendship when he worked at the magazine would no longer speak to him. He had become an undesirable, and says he was beaten up in public several times.

After Uria spent three years in a kind of limbo, a friend with diplomatic contacts was able to get him an application for refugee status in the United States. (Cuban citizens cannot just walk into the U.S. Interests Section in Havana; instead they must apply for an appointment by mail.) As a last resort, Uria filled out the form. "I made that form a work of art," he remembers, pantomiming how he pressed out the wrinkled application with an iron and carefully composed the answers to each question. "I didn't become a writer in vain."

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, D.C., requires that foreign nationals applying for refugee status prove that they are "being persecuted or that they have a well-founded fear of persecution based on their religion, nationality, race, political beliefs, or association with a certain group or class of people." Explains INS spokesman Russ Bergeron, "They have to establish a credible claim that they have been persecuted. That can mean a loss of employment, being deprived of a certain standard of living. They have to show that they've experienced or have reason to believe they will experience persecution that results in an individual being unjustly treated compared to others within that state." (INS statistics show that so far in 1995, 7199 Cubans have been awarded refugee status.)

Uria received a letter from the U.S. government informing him that his application had been accepted for consideration. He put his court records, his stories, his 13 de Marzo award certificate, and other personal papers in a plastic bag and went to the office of the U.S. Interests Section, housed in the old U.S. Embassy building. After his interview with a young American woman, he was accepted for refugee status on August 2, 1994. Three days later, on August 5, the rafter crisis began in earnest, considerably delaying Uria's departure.

Finally he was given a ticket by the U.S. government for a flight scheduled to leave Cuba on April 5, 1995, exactly four years to the day after he was expelled from the Casa de Las Americas. He was being sent to Las Vegas, where he would be resettled under the auspices of the Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada refugee program.

On the morning of April 5, he went with his family to the airport, still uncertain whether the Cuban government would allow him to leave. "I said goodbye to my family, but I told them to wait. I didn't know if I was getting on the plane or going to prison. In any case I didn't know if I would ever see them again," he says, tears welling up in his eyes. "If you haven't lived through it, you really can't imagine what it's like. You're at God's mercy."