Susan's Daily Log of Witness Against Torture

The trip to visit the prisoners at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Monday December 5
We are flying over the Atlantic Ocean from the Dominican Republic to Santiago, Cuba. The ocean is deep blue, the Aero Caribbean plane is small, and after many uncertainties and some lost luggage, we are all on the plane (except for 4 who had taken a different route). We weren't sure we'd make the connecting flight, or even be allowed into the country, and I am thankful and elated. Yet the prisoners in Guantanamo who have been transported in planes, strapped down, hooded, shackled and cuffed, never see the beauty of the land and ocean, and don't know where they are going.
For the past couple of days, my prayer has been that we all get into Cuba, and we all get to walk to the US Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay. I have been feeling thankful to so many people who have worked hard to make this journey happen, to the people who helped us financially, with their prayers, and with all kinds of support, and to our communities at home who now have even more work to do in our absence.
There's consolation in the attempt to get to the base. I feel alive, alert, and awake. Could I be this way all the time? Meanwhile I am aware of the hunger strikers at the naval base, the interrogation and imprisonment with no sense of end, and the attempts of the interrogators to weaken the faith of the prisoners.

In the evening some of us meet with a person from the hotel and from Immigration. We all came in under a tourist visa, and the Immigration officer tells us that we can't march to the Naval Station under a tourist visa. He suggests that we talk to the people at ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos) who might be able to help us.

Tuesday December 6
Some of us meet with folks from ICAP, and talk about who we are and what we hope to do. We hear a history of the base, the story of the Cuban 5, and at the end of the day, after various discussions, the people at ICAP suggest that we walk and camp along the way, and they tell us that can have prayer services outside. There is a lot of discussion; it's a hard day from most of us. I am struggling with being patient.

Wednesday December 7
Carmen visits the Church of the Sacred Family in Santiago and meets the Catholic nuns there. He arranges for us to have Mass: the church is lovely, the acoustics amplify our voices.
The reading from Isaiah 40:25-31 ends:

“Do you not know or have you not heard?
The Lord is the eternal God, creator of the ends of the earth.
God does not faint nor grow weary, and God's knowledge is beyond scrutiny.
God gives strength to the fainting; for the weak, God makes vigor abound.
Though young men faint and grow weary, and youths stagger and fall,
They that hope in the Lord will renew their strength,
They will soar as with eagles' wings;
They will run and not grow weary, walk and not grow faint.”

What a reading to send us off! They that hope in God will renew their strength. They will walk, and not grow faint. We are ready to begin the walk and we start at 11:30.

We talk to several people along the road, telling them where we are going. Claire's Spanish is good enough for clear and gentle conversations. I imagine that Jesus is walking with us, along side of us.
We take a break by the side of the road, next to where a man is selling fresh pineapples. We buy some fruit, the sweet fresh taste in contrast the hunger strike of the prisoners.
We stop to remember the 4 Christian Peacemakers who are being held hostage in Iraq. Sr. Anne Montgomery leads us in a prayer service. Prisoners at the Naval Station are also held hostage—some kidnapped in Afghanistan.
We express our sorrow to the Cuban people that our government is torturing people on their soil.
That evening we stay in the town. Alto Songo, in the back yard of a family kind enough to let all 25 of us camp. We continue to think of the CPT hostages, and the prisoners at Guantanamo. During the night I am cold and damp. I had packed for warm weather, and had brought only a flannel sheet to sleep in, and a yoga mat to sleep on. The yoga mat never made it from the hotel room to the camping spot, and the flannel sheet didn't do much. But I remembered the prisoners who slept in the cages, exposed to the cold and damp. And even those in cells have only a light blanket, it seems. So at night I felt in solidarity with the prisoners. Also, three people had lost their packs on the plane, and must have been cold.

Thursday December 8
We get up before dawn, take down our tents and start to walk as it's getting light. Taking down a tent, I can't see well, and realize my glasses have fallen off, in the dark. I look for them and finally Bill finds them---the frames are broken. This is very hard for me. We walk through the day, taking breaks each hour for water and a short rest.
That evening, we camped in Yerba de Guinea. The house is owned by a family that includes a pregnant woman, and the place seems to be a bus stop. All night there are people going up and down the hill to the road.
After we get our tents up, Yuniel and a videographer come up the hill to meet us. Yuniel invites us to a meeting, and suggests that we could camp at the meeting place as well. He is arranging for a bus to pick us all up. Later that evening, the bus comes, and takes us to a coffee and banana workers' cooperative where we meet with Caridad Diego, The Director of the Office of Religious Affairs, Josephina Vidal, the Deputy Director of the North American Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Yuniel Gomez, who is also with the North American Ministry of Foreign Relations.
We explained who we were and what our hopes were. Anne talked about the Christian Peacemakers Team, Carmen talked about the Catholic Worker, and I talked about Plowshares actions, and our stand against the US warmaking. Matt talked about the hopes that were in all of our hearts.
We want to visit the prisoners; we want the world to know that many people in the US do not support the torture and indefinite detention of prisoners, and we want the prisoners to know that we are out here, that we care, that we are walking and praying. We want to bring them encouragement.
We hear from the Cubans about the history of the US base at Guantanamo and the Platt Amendment. Caridad tells us that she came there with the intention of shutting the walk down, but that after hearing us, she will help us. She suggests that the walk could end at a certain place where we could hold the vigil we had hoped for—perhaps at a church. There are still 50 K to Guantanamo, so there is time to think about things.
We get a ride in the bus back to our campsite.

Friday December 9
In the morning, Steve Kelly, S.J. leads us in prayer and the Eucharist. We have stopped each day along the road to pray together, to share the Eucharist. We invite our hosts to join us, and they join us bringing a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
We begin to walk with a clear police escort. At one point, several of us stop to have more discussion with Caridad, Josephina and Yuniel. They join us later in the day, with news that we cannot walk in Guantanamo at all, as there is a general call up of everyone to practice for an emergency-- invasion or hurricanes. And, we are told, we have to be out of the whole area by Sunday night. The Cubans will pick us up later that evening in the bus to discuss our decision with us.
There didn't seem to be many options, but we continue walking. In the afternoon, we start looking for a place to stay. People who own their land don't have enough room for all of us, and we had understood that we couldn't camp on government land. It was dark, and we had no place to stay. The bus came to pick up us, and we accepted the hospitality that was offered to us at the meeting place. We go into the meeting, and before anything, Caridad tells us that she has been working very hard for us. She tells us that we can walk through Guantanamo that we can walk up to the Cuban check point before the base, and that we can vigil there at the check point with banners. She tells us that Colonel Balacio Baldana, the head of the Border Brigade of the Armed Forces, will take us to the headquarters and will show us a model of the base and tell us about the history of the base.
I am listening, and tears are coming down my face. I look around at the others and notice tears on Frida and Jackie's cheeks… Emotions are gold. They are the place were we can discern the holy spirit working in us. And here, we heard again that the Cubans were moved by our words and actions, and wanted to help us. What a gift. What a feeling of solidarity.
That night we pitched our tents on a basketball field.

Saturday December 10
Human Rights Day In the morning we started out walking. Now, as it is with many things, it takes a group of us a while to learn how to do things together. We had been meeting for 7 months, and had confidence in the group process. And now we had been walking for a couple of days, and we had figured out how to walk together. We read one of the stories of the Guantanamo prisoners from Amnesty International, and began to walk silently, single file down the road toward the US Naval Base at Guantanamo.
We started off at a good pace. Around noon we stopped for a short rest, and started up again. When Caridad, Josephina and Yuniel came by to see us, I asked Yuniel if he knew of a place in the town of Guantanamo where I could get my glasses fixed. He did, and I was looking forward to getting them fixed. But then later, as we were walking, he pulled up next to me and said that he would take them and get them fixed for me. So I gave him my glasses.
We finally got to the outskirts of the town, and were met by the bus, and our Cuban friends. Yuniel said that they weren't able to fix my glasses, but he gave me another pair in their stead!! What a surprise—what a relief to be able to see things around me easily.
They gave us a ride through town to the Episcopal church we were going to stay in, and then picked us all up to go to the military base to see the model of the base. At the base, we also saw a short video about the Cuban 5, and about the daughter of one of the men. Ivette has not been able to visit because her mother can't get a visa to come into the US.
We spend the night at the Episcopal Church. Anne Montgomery and I spend the night at the hotel room. There we can get a shower!

Sunday December 11
Steve and Tanya used both rental cars to shuttle everyone to the outskirts of town. Tom had made a cross, and carried it out front. We followed with the banner. People around us are using bikes, trucks, cars and are all moving here and there, preparing for this day of education and mobilization,
We are near the final checkpoint, the military check point to the military controlled area around the base. We are closer than any family members of the prisoners have been able to come. We are less than 10 miles away from the prisoners.
As we walk, Caridad, Josephine and a couple of other Cubans come and walk with us for a while.. We are near the check point…and come to a fork in the road. Dina, who has been translating for us, asks if the town is Glorieta, and the people say yes, so we walk down the road into the town. We walk past a baseball game, past the café, past the panneria, and we get near the water, and see a big swinging barricade in the road. It didn't really look like a military checkpoint, but it was a definite barrier.

We are stopped. A man is there, who tells us that this is the entrance to the salt mine area. The military checkpoint is just down the road, he said, and started to lead us there. So, we turned around and started to walk back, past the panneria, past the café, past the baseball game. A remembrance of Gandhi. A simple mistake. Then we walked down the road a short ways, and see the check point, our Cuban friends, and our support car. As we walk up to the checkpoint, Josephina comes out and stands in front of us, she welcomes us, and the Colonel spoke to us. He said that as a gesture of their solidarity with us, he would let us walk past the white line that no one may pass. So we walk past the white line, right up to the barricade. We stand with our banners, read a story of one of the Guantanamo prisoners on hunger strike, read a passage from Isaiah (the reading for the day).
Isaiah 61:1
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me;
God has sent me to bring glad tiding to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners.

I remember all the times I've been at Concord Naval Weapons Station, where a white line has been painted. Crossing that line has meant immediate arrest. Even though our intents were peaceful, our hope for all the children of the earth, no Colonel or General has ever said that they agreed with us, and in solidarity we could cross the line. So, even though it was a symbolic gesture, it was meaningful. We were as close as we could get, unless the US decided to let us into the base. We were closer than any family members had been able to get. We were closer that we had hoped, many times during the walk. The sadness of the prison, the pain of the torture, the solidarity with the Cubans, the hope of a better world…a very emotional time.
We hung our banners up on the barbwire next to the checkpoint. We set up our tents, and had the liturgy of the word, and the Eucharist. We invited the Cubans to join us in prayer, and they did.

Monday December 12
We are fasting. Fasting in repentance, in solidarity with the prisoners, fasting to open the prison gates, to open ourselves to God, to help us to hunger and thirst for righteousness. We were fasting to prepare ourselves to visit the prisoners.
We also decide to have a 24-hour vigil—so that some of us would be in prayer or reflection in the area we set up, facing the direction where the prisoners were being held. We read the Amnesty International accounts of the prisoners, some said the rosary, some the daily readings.

I read a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, “The Experiment” which tells about how US soldiers learn how to resist torture in a program called SERE, which stands for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.” The program is run by psychologists and psychiatrists who know how to create stress in coercive methods of interrogation, and know how to bring people to their breaking points. As the soldiers learn how to resist torture, they are, of course, also learning how to torture. In the SERE program, the soldiers experience the “religious dilemma” where the interrogator rips up and defaces a bible, but will stop if the “prisoner” gives information. The soldiers hooded, experience uncertainty, sleep patterns are disrupted, they are starved, stripped of their clothes, exposed to extreme temperatures, subjected to harsh interrogations that include waterboarding.
It's clear that the torture used by our government is not an “accident,” the work of a few “bad apples” but a carefully planned part of the program.

Tuesday December 13
At 4 am, we climb a nearby hill and look over the base. We can see the perimeter lights, the big tower light, the runway and building lights. Sitting there on the mountain, watching, contemplating the prison, I had the feeling that I was near a concentration camp. People who were “different” had been kidnapped and were being tortured.
We have a press conference, press from Havana are able to come. Still we understand that some press has not been allowed into the country. We prayed and fasted until Thursday morning, when we had a Eucharist and then broke fast and camp, and headed back to Santiago, the Dominican Republic, and the USA.
When we arrived in Newark, we were questioned by Customs officers, working for OFAC, the Office of Foreign Assets Control. My bag was searched (with all the smelly clothes from camping for 12 days) and copies were made of various papers and my passport.