(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CHIP BRANTLEY, HOST:
Previously on WHITE LIES.
RAFAEL PENALVER: In many cases, we never heard back from them. It was like if the earth had swallowed them.
ALBA MALES: There was a list, and I've always wondered what happened to the ones. But as you know, it's impossible to find out.
CYNTHIA CORZO: His name is Jorge Luis Marquez Medina.
LINDA CALHOUN: I would want to find out what happened. You know, just - you got to wonder.
ANDREW BECK GRACE, HOST:
This is the list.
BRANTLEY: We have the list.
GRACE: This is the list.
BRANTLEY: We are holding the list.
GRACE: Well, what do we do with the list now that we have it?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRACE: When a source sent us the secret list, drawn up in 1984, of the 2,746 Mariel Cubans the U.S. government wanted to deport back to Cuba, the first thing we did was to confirm many of our suspicions. Dozens and dozens of cases we'd read about and interviewed people about were there on the list - people who arrived in 1980 and were never released from custody, people suspected but never charged with a crime in the U.S., people acquitted of crimes who, nevertheless, found themselves detained by the INS, people who spent only a few months in jail for a minor crime, like marijuana possession, but then found themselves spending year after year after year in federal immigration detention. So many of the stories we tracked down were there, along with the most shocking names on the list - five Mariel Cubans who died in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta before the list was ever even announced.
It had become clear to us that the names on the list were arbitrary, that when the INS and the Department of State created the list in 1984, they simply put forth the names of Mariel Cubans they knew were being held in immigration detention at that moment. And for the people on the list, the people the government had called the excludables, most of the time, they didn't even know they were on the list until they were moved to the federal prison in Talladega, Ala., to await their deportation.
BRANTLEY: So we knew all that about how the list was created. And now that we had the list, we could use it to finally track down the men on the roof and hear them tell their own stories. In 2017, the Immigration Service told the Miami Herald that of those on the list, 2,020 had been sent back to Cuba since 1984, another 250 had died, and 476 were too old and sick to be returned. So almost all of the people we wanted to talk to, if they were even still alive and if we could even find them, would likely be in Cuba.
(SOUNDBITE OF PHONE RINGING)
GRACE: Can you hear me? Hey, Manuel.
MANUEL GUERRERO: Hey, man.
GRACE: How are you?
GUERRERO: I'm just fine. Sitting at a park at the moment.
GRACE: To get internet?
GUERRERO: Yeah, to get a better signal, I guess.
GRACE: OK. Yeah.
BRANTLEY: This is Manuel Guerrero. Manuel has been our interpreter and researcher in Cuba as we've worked to try and track down these men. He works with Mairim Rosa Sanchez, who is our all-around fixer and the one who makes everything happen. We heard from them earlier when we were looking for Jose Hernandez-Mesa, and we've checked in with them both frequently over the last year or so.
GRACE: When they started working with us, Manuel and Mairim brought their own stories about Mariel. They were both born about a decade after the boatlift, but the ripples of what had happened in 1980 had affected Cubans of their generation as well. And this work, the promise of discovering something hidden about their own country - it was compelling to both of them.
GUERRERO: When you think of the word in Spanish - in Spanish, the word is excluible. It sort of, like, rings this bell. Like, excludable in Spanish ends up being synonym with disposable - with desechable. You know, that's actually the darkest side of the word. It's hurtful, actually, when you think about it. You know, when you imagine your life being an excludable, being a disposable person, being someone they can use and then discard - I don't know. I don't know if I'm being coherent at this point. I'm just talking out of my heart.
GRACE: The list of 2,746 excludables does not contain any narrative information - no information about why they'd been held, where they'd been detained, when or if they'd been deported, nothing - just a name, an alien number and a date of birth. And so with just that to go on, we started searching for the men on the list. Our system included the usual suspects - Google, Facebook, Ancestry - but also public records directories, court and prison records, newspaper archives and a pretty incredible database created by the Miami Herald to try to document every Cuban who came to the U.S. during Mariel - the name of the boat they came on, their arrival date in Key West, the name of the person who sponsored them out. We also combed through special collections scattered around the country in Miami, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Atlanta - places we knew the men on the list had passed through during their time in the U.S. And, of course, we had the massive searchable database we'd created by scanning all the files in the basement of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.
Hundreds and hundreds of the names on the list turned up nothing in these various databases. But whenever we got a hit - a marriage certificate, a mention in a newspaper article, a letter in an archive, a tidbit from a lawyer or sponsor or second cousin, anything that could help Manuel and Mairim in their search - we'd send them that information to see if they could find the person in Cuba.
GUERRERO: Just send me the - both those names and I'll see what I can do. Yeah, I'll start shaking the tree in Jesus Maria, probably, or Cayo Hueso, two of the most impoverished quarters of Havana where I have a few friends that can help me through that.
BRANTLEY: This went on for months - send some names and wait. Manuel and Mairim traversing the city, knocking on doors, sending us voice memos. Some people, like Jose Hernandez-Mesa, seemed untraceable. And others, when Mairim and Manuel went to the last known address, were no longer there for one reason or another.
GUERRERO: Mairim visited his address, and actually it was one of his neighbors that said that he had died. And during the COVID isolation, he got the disease and died from it.
BRANTLEY: And then there were people who, for understandable reasons, just didn't want to be involved. It was a lot to bring back up. Some of them had worked incredibly hard to try and forget all about this time in their lives, this time they'd spent the United States, in some cases, detained for over a decade without a charge.
MAIRIM ROSA SANCHEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: One afternoon, we got this voice memo from Mairim. She was standing on the street outside the home of a man we'll just call by his first name, Francisco. We'd heard about Francisco from Susan Miller, the investigator who worked on the Jose Hernandez-Mesa case. She had always wondered what had happened to him.
SUSAN MILLER: Francisco was the first Mariel case I worked on, and I used to not be able to sleep at night because when I would close my eyes to go to sleep, I would see this kid in a cage.
GRACE: Francisco's name was on the list. He had just turned 16 when he arrived from Mariel. Susan met him a few years later at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He'd been paroled to a halfway house outside Philadelphia, and he got jumped in a train station there. He fought back and was arrested for assault, which is what had brought him to Atlanta. Susan remembered him as incredibly bright and thoughtful, just basically this gentle kid in way over his head. We found his deportation record from February of 1991. And then Mairim found him in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana.
ROSA SANCHEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: When Mairim asked if they could talk about his time in the U.S., Francisco became distressed. He told her that his life was no longer in the U.S. He'd been here, back in Cuba, since 1991. He said he didn't want to be interviewed. He wasn't rude or dismissive, Mairim said. But clearly, her showing up, asking if he would want to talk with us, it had made him uncomfortable and maybe even a little afraid. He said he remembered nothing. Didn't want to remember anything.
ROSA SANCHEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: "He's an excludable," Mairim says, "and he's also an excludable in his own country."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRANTLEY: But Mairim and Manuel kept knocking on doors, kept making phone calls, kept trying to find the men we sent their way. And eventually, they found some people who were willing to talk, people who wanted to tell their stories, people who, when asked if American journalists might come to interview them, had said, yes, tell them to come down. I will tell them what I know.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRANTLEY: From NPR, this is WHITE LIES. I'm Chip Brantley.
GRACE: And I'm Andrew Beck Grace.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: And please do try and keep the aisles clear so that the flight attendants may...
GRACE: From the southernmost point of the continental United States to the island of Cuba is just about 90 miles, a stretch of water called the Florida Straits.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: ...Flight to Havana has taken us across the Everglades. We'll be passing Key West in about eight minutes, and then we'll make a turn to the west for...
GRACE: The flight from Miami to Havana takes just a little over an hour, so quick they don't even do a beverage service. And when you're in the air flying between the two countries, it's hard not to think about all the family separation, all the trauma, all the heartbreak that has elapsed over this stretch of the ocean. The United States' embargo with Cuba has lasted over 60 years, the longest trade embargo anywhere in modern history. Whatever rationale the U.S. government might have made for the embargo seems lost now in its perpetuity. It really is astounding that a place so close, a place so connected to so many American citizens could remain walled off by the stretch of water and the intractability of a policy that has brought so much suffering on both sides of the straits for generations.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Welcome to Havana, Cuba, where the local time is 11:17 - approximately - a.m. Once again, we do...
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRANTLEY: On one of our first days in Cuba, we walked to the site of the old Peruvian Embassy. It was here in April of 1980 when Castro removed the guards from the embassy and said that anyone who wanted to leave could do so, that over 10,000 people swarmed onto the grounds, creating a humanitarian crisis that resulted in the boatlift. We'd read the embassy had been turned into a museum - El Museo del Pueblo Combatiente, the Museum of the People in Combat - which told the story of American aggression against Cuba. We went to where someone had told us it used to be, but the building was gone.
There was a man sitting on a ledge near the sidewalk who saw us looking around, confused. He asked what we were looking for, and when we told him, he said that, yeah, the building was here, but it had been torn down. He pointed to the lawn of a nearby hotel and told us that that's where it had been. The man said that no one wants to talk about Mariel. It's too difficult. So many people left and never came back. We don't want to remember it, he said. He told us that someone from his neighborhood who had left during Mariel had returned to visit the island just a few years ago. Back in 1980, when this man was waiting for passage to Mariel, one of his neighbors had thrown eggs at him, a common so-called act of repudiation. So when the man returned to visit the island, he'd gone to the market and bought two flats of eggs. He rang the door of the neighbor who'd thrown eggs at him. Who are you, the neighbor said. I don't know you. It had been 40 years. Yes, you do, said the man with the eggs, and I wanted to give you these back.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRACE: We drove the 30 miles from Havana to the town of Mariel and went down to the harbor. There wasn't much to see, really. There aren't any markers to the boatlift at the water's edge, no plaques downtown, no mention that this sleepy little port city was the site of one of the largest single mass migration events in the Western Hemisphere. One Cuban told us, we have markers to everything but not to that.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUERRERO: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: Can we go back to the very beginning, and can you tell us where you were when the boatlift started?
GUERRERO: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: We're in a Soviet-era housing block of five-story concrete apartment buildings in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, and we're on the top floor in the corner apartment, where Matias Prieto Campo lives. Matias is on the list. When the boatlift began, Matias felt like his options were limited in Cuba. He had tried to leave the island once before as a teenager, but in 1980, he was in his mid-20s, and the boatlift seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
MATIAS PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: They were taken by bus to Mariel, and the camp where they were taken, El Mosquito, was a horrible place, Matias says. It was raining all the time - leaky tents, mud everywhere, only one cistern to get a drink of water, police guards with dogs, virtually no food.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: But then they were off.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: When he was finally loaded onto a boat, he was famished. They hadn't eaten for days, and someone on the boat fed them Vienna sausages.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: "And when we were in the boat moving away from the coast of Cuba," Matias says, "the tears came out because no one in my family or my mother knew I was leaving the country."
GRACE: Matias arrived in Key West and then was taken to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. At McCoy, he did an interview with the INS. Matias says a refugee who'd come from one of the Cuban prisons acted as an informer to the INS.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: What Matias is saying that - is that in his case, while he was detained by - in an immigration internment camp, there was this group of people that were working with the immigration authorities in sorting out those that they knew or pretended to know that have been criminals in Cuba.
BRANTLEY: So other Cubans.
GUERRERO: Yeah, other Cubans that pointed at particular people. And in his case, he was victim of one of those processes, of anonymous incrimination. He was separated as a criminal and then taken to an actual prison - I mean, not an immigration internment camp but a common prison.
BRANTLEY: Right.
GUERRERO: Yeah.
BRANTLEY: Did they tell him what the accusation was, like, what he was accused of having done in Cuba?
GUERRERO: (Speaking Spanish).
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: Yeah. No, they did not specify. They simply said that he had a criminal record in Cuba and sorted him out because of that.
GRACE: Then Matias was sent, well, just about everywhere.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: Fort McCoy in Wisconsin to Talladega.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: McNeil Island in Washington State, then Oklahoma.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: Then Atlanta.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: Leavenworth, then back to Talladega and finally to Cuba.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: Matias was one of those men on the list who was never released from prison, never charged with a crime in the United States, detained in this case because another Mariel Cuban told the INS he'd been a serious criminal in Cuba. In his interview, Matias had told the INS that he'd been in a Cuban jail once, sentenced to six months for refusing to join the military. And this decision to tell the truth had haunted Matias in the eight years he'd spent locked up in immigration detention. As you might imagine, it's really hard to fact-check some of the details in a story like this, but in Matias' case, he showed us a pretty remarkable document. After he'd been back in Cuba for about a decade, Matias had applied for an exit visa through the Cuban government, and in the process, they'd sent him a full background check, showing that the only time Matias had been in jail was that short stint for refusing to join the military.
GRACE: In the files in the basement of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, we'd come across Matias' name from a letter he'd written to a journalist while he was detained in Talladega shortly before he was deported. What kind of immigration laws have I violated when I've never been out on the streets, he wrote. What are the reasons, he asked the journalist, that in a democratic country such as the United States, they are keeping us in this inhumane cruelty in great silence, very hidden from public opinion and the eyes of the world?
BRANTLEY: Thank you.
GRACE: Thank you.
PRIETO CAMPO: (Speaking Spanish).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRANTLEY: One evening, killing a little time before supper, we wandered into a shop in Old Havana. While we looked around, we chatted with someone who worked in the shop. He asked us where we were from, and we said, Los Estados Unidos, Alabama. Then, just fishing a little bit, as we sometimes did in Cuba, we said we were working on a project about Cubans who left during the Mariel boatlift and ended up in a prison in Talladega. And then, as if people came in all the time talking about the boatlift in Talladega, he goes, oh, well, you should talk to Roberto. He turned around and pointed to the front of the store, where there were a couple of people talking. Oh, yeah? we said, Roberto? He left during Mariel and came back? No, he said, Roberto left during Mariel and was sent back.
He introduced us to Roberto, and we told him why we were in Cuba, and he said he'd be willing to have a conversation later that night. He said to meet back at the shop at 11 p.m. When we checked the list for Roberto's full name, there it was. We'd found nothing about Roberto in all the archives we searched, so we had no information to pass along that would have helped Manuel and Mairim track him down in Cuba. It was just dumb luck that we'd found him.
GRACE: When Chip and I and our producer Connor returned to the shop at 11, it was closed, and Roberto and his friend were waiting for us on the street.
CONNOR TOWNE O'NEILL, BYLINE: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: They looked nervous. Roberto's friend told Connor they wanted to go somewhere else, away from the store and the police who worked in the area.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: He said we should walk to a nearby park where people go to get internet and where it wouldn't look out of place to have a group of people talking together.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Speaking Spanish).
TOWNE O'NEILL: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: No juntos. We can't all walk together, he said.
TOWNE O'NEILL: He said to follow him at 50 meters.
GRACE: Some Cold War stuff.
So we spread out and trailed behind him through the streets of Old Havana and past the city's Central Park until we found an empty bench on the promenade of the Paseo del Prado. Down the street, we could see a few policemen walking with a German shepherd.
ROBERTO: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: Roberto tells us that he was detained on arrival in 1980 for not having papers, that he spent more than 10 years in detention in Atlanta and Talladega before being deported back to Cuba. He remembers on the flight back wishing for the plane not to land, that it would just keep flying above that narrow stretch of sea between the United States and Cuba. He spent 40 days in quarantine in a Cuban prison when he first got back, and since then, he's lived a life on the fringes, unwanted by the U.S. and unwanted in Cuba as well.
TOWNE O'NEILL: (Speaking Spanish).
ROBERTO: (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: Connor wonders if there's a community of Mariel excludables, and Roberto says, yes, but it's very small. Some of them, he said, had left Havana and were living somewhere else in Cuba under assumed names, and many of them had since left the country, either tried to go back to the U.S. over land through Mexico to the border or via the Florida Straits. Roberto tried once to leave the country on a raft, but just a few miles out, it started taking on water, and he had to turn back.
We were sitting just a few blocks from the Malecon, the city's famous waterfront boulevard and seawall where Roberto had left on that raft, and we talked for a little while longer about his life back in Cuba before asking about what his time had been like in the U.S. He still remembered his INS number, the prison guards in Atlanta prone to violence, the long wait for his deportation flight at Talladega. And talking about those final days in Talladega reminded us of talking to Linda Calhoun, the INS clerk who'd always wanted to know what happened to these men after they were sent back to Cuba.
TOWNE O'NEILL: (Speaking Spanish).
ROBERTO: Ah, Linda. (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: Roberto jumped to his feet, a big grin on his face. He said he didn't have a ton of interaction with the INS clerks at Talladega, but he remembered Linda.
ROBERTO: Miss Linda. Hi. Hello. Bye-bye. (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: Linda would always speak to the detainees, say hello and goodbye. He could go to her for help or sometimes just to chat. She helped him get a pair of shoes, a radio with headphones. Thirty years later, he remembered her kindness.
TOWNE O'NEILL: (Speaking Spanish).
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRACE: It was after midnight when we finally wrapped up talking with Roberto. He had told us about how being an excludable has made it more difficult to find work. And as we talked, each one of us would occasionally glance over to where the police officers were sitting and chatting at the end of the block. Roberto told us that he's often surveilled and sometimes roughed up by the police. He's been sent to labor camps to cut sugarcane. He's not supposed to go into certain parts of town, and he struggles to find stable housing. So many of the men Mairim and Manuel tracked down lived their lives on the margins. Matias told us how whenever there is a foreign dignitary in town, the police will come to his house and tell him to stay home for a while, a kind of subtle house arrest. One of the men Manuel and Mairim had arranged for us to speak with, when we showed up, had just been given a 16-month sentence in prison because he didn't have a stable job. Another man, whose family we'd interviewed in Miami, had agreed to meet with us in Havana. But just before we got there, his family sent word that he had left the island and was en route, trying to make his way back to the United States.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Non-English language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: (Non-English language spoken).
BRANTLEY: One afternoon, we drove to a neighborhood south of Central Havana to talk with a man named Rafael (ph). He had told us to meet him at 2:30. But when we showed up, there was nobody at his place...
(SOUNDBITE OF DOG BARKING)
BRANTLEY: ...Just his dog, who looked a lot like Salacious B. Crumb, that monkey-lizard creature that Jabba the Hutt kept as a pet.
GUERRERO: Rafael?
BRANTLEY: A neighbor told us to check his daughter's place just a mile or so away.
What did she say to look for?
GUERRERO: She told us to look for the park. That's our first reference point.
BRANTLEY: Look for a park?
GUERRERO: Yeah, but not a park. It's, like, a place with benches. We have to look for the park first, then for the pharmacy and then for a two-story building painted green.
BRANTLEY: We found the park-not-park, and then the pharmacy and then the green, two-story building. When Manuel and Mairim talked to the daughter, she told them that we'd just missed him, that Rafael had started walking back to his place a few minutes before.
GUERRERO: It's starting to feel like we're being played.
BRANTLEY: When Manuel and Mairim had first shown up at Rafael's door several weeks before, he sat down with them and talked about things he hadn't talked about in years. By the end, he told them it was all a little too much. And he became distraught, cut the interview short. He did say he'd meet with us when we were in town. Now it felt like he'd had second thoughts and was avoiding us. But we decided to drive to his place one more time. And this time, he was home.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOG BARKING)
RAFAEL: (Non-English language spoken).
(SOUNDBITE OF DOG BARKING)
RAFAEL: (Non-English language spoken).
GRACE: Rafael invited us in. He was shirtless and haggard. We weren't sure if he'd been drinking or sleeping or crying or all three.
RAFAEL: (Non-English language spoken).
GUERRERO: No offense, but the U.S. government doesn't love anyone.
RAFAEL: (Non-English language spoken)
GUERRERO: He says he spent six years in Atlanta for no reason.
GRACE: Rafael came to the U.S. from Mariel on a giant shrimp boat. He knew no one else. He was only 17 years old, one of 204 men on the list who were under the age of 18 when they'd left Cuba. When he arrived in the U.S., authorities sent him to Fort Chaffee. After several weeks there, Rafael and another young Cuban refugee took an old army truck and went on a joyride around northwest Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma before being arrested and returned to the base.
Instead of being reprimanded or being sent to the secure Level 2 section of Fort Chaffee, Rafael was charged with theft of government property, interstate transportation of a stolen vehicle and conspiracy. But the thing is, he was only charged. He was never tried. Instead, he was transferred to the federal prison in Atlanta. Like that Reagan administration memo had said, the guilt which resulted in his incarceration had never been adjudicated.
GUERRERO: After what he did at Chaffee, they took him to Atlanta. And he spent six years there.
BRANTLEY: Did you know where you were going when you went to Atlanta?
RAFAEL: No. Never.
BRANTLEY: Where did you think you were going?
RAFAEL: No idea.
GRACE: He arrived in Atlanta from Fort Chaffee a year before the camp closed.
BRANTLEY: You remember when Fort Chaffee closed and all the other Cubans came from Fort Chaffee to Atlanta?
RAFAEL: Yes.
BRANTLEY: And what do you remember about that?
RAFAEL: (Non-English language spoken).
GUERRERO: Yeah. Essentially, he feels that when Fort Chaffee was closed and all those people were relocated in Atlanta, he felt that a major injustice was being committed against them. And of course, in addition to everything he had already felt and lived while being there, that strengthened his belief that, essentially, the U.S. government was being insensible with them.
BRANTLEY: Rafael was sent to Atlanta in 1981. And that year, Judge Marvin Shoob, the federal judge who repeatedly ruled in favor of the Mariel detainees, ordered the Justice Department to set up a review plan for all of the Cuban men being held in the prison. At Rafael's hearing, it was recommended that he be released. But before that could happen, a court overruled Judge Shoob's entire review plan. And so Rafael remained in Atlanta for six years. Because he was in detention in 1984, his name was put on the list. When he was finally sponsored out, he settled in Washington, D.C. One night, he was walking home and got stopped by the police. Someone had broken into a car nearby. And as the police questioned Rafael, they ran his immigration number through the system. Because he was on the list, he had a red flag next to his name. The police took him in and then handed him over to the INS, who eventually relocated him to Talladega to await deportation.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRACE: It was there, in the Alpha Unit of the Talladega Federal Correctional Institution in August, 1991, that he was released from his cell one morning by some of his fellow detainees, who then took bed sheets and made banners that they took to the roof. Rafael was deported on September 8, 1991, nine days after the end of the Talladega uprising.
GUERRERO: He's one of the exceptional cases and doesn't want to return to the United States. But since he spent 11 years there, and most of those 11 years he spent in prison, and after that, he was deported, he doesn't want to have anything to do with the United States.
RAFAEL: (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: I mean, we have a very strong sense of community, a sense of shared values. That's something that he feels that the Americans don't have.
RAFAEL: (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: It's not that you're bad people. It's just that you lack that, that sense of - that humane feeling.
RAFAEL: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: You lack feelings, Rafael said. And then Rafael quoted a line famous among Cubans from the poet Jose Marti. Writing from the U.S. Marti had described his time there. I have lived in the monster, and I know its entrails. We didn't stay at Rafael's much longer. There wasn't much else to say. It became clear as we sat in his cramped apartment that he didn't really want to do this interview in the first place. The only thing he had really wanted to tell us was this - that he'd found no human warmth in the U.S., no sense of kinship, no sense of shared values. We'd come all the way from the U.S. to Cuba to ask him how it felt to be detained by our government without a charge for nearly a decade. And the answer had been rather simple.
ERNESTO ACIEGO-MORE: (Speaking Spanish). Sit down. Please.
BRANTLEY: One early evening, we went to another part of town to meet with a man named Ernesto Aciego-More. Manuel and Mairim had visited with Ernesto and spent several hours with him before our trip. And they'd met Ernesto's his 90-year-old mother, too.
ACIEGO-MORE: She's my mother.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: When we asked if there was anything we might bring Manuel and Mairim from the U.S., anything they were having a hard time getting in Cuba, they said, yes, please bring some over-the-counter pain relievers - not for us, for Ernesto's mother. She'd fallen and broken her hip.
(CROSSTALK)
BRANTLEY: Ernesto had wanted us to meet his mother and say hello, but he wanted to conduct the interview down the street at a friend's house. We walked into the warm evening air. So many people on the street talking.
ACIEGO-MORE: (Speaking Spanish).
GRACE: In the summer of 1980, Ernesto was 21 years old and working as a technician in Cuba's commercial fishing fleet. He was disaffected with his life in Cuba, with Fidel Castro, especially. When he heard about the boatlift. He talked it over with his mother and decided to start over in the U.S. He landed in Key West and was sent to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin for processing by the INS.
ACIEGO-MORE: (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: So he went through an interview with the INS. And he doesn't know why, but after that, the woman who had interviewed him told the guard to conduct him elsewhere. He refers to the place as a dog pound.
GRACE: During the interview, when the INS agent asked if he'd ever been in prison in Cuba, he said in an offhand way, everyone in Cuba has been in prison at some point. She seems to have taken that as an admission of some wrongdoing because he was immediately detained at Fort McCoy and then sent to the federal prison in Atlanta.
BRANTLEY: So what were they telling you during this time from Fort McCoy to Atlanta? What was happening to you? What was your understanding of what was happening to you?
ACIEGO-MORE: (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: He thought at first that this was going to be some scheduled movement from Fort McCoy to somewhere else that he could meet his sponsors or something like that before being released. When that did not happen, that's when he realized that he was being treated as a prisoner instead of someone who was going to be released and enter society.
ACIEGO-MORE: (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: The negative impression happened later, when he realized that he was going to be there for a long time. So he spent eight years in Atlanta.
GRACE: Eight years in the federal prison in Atlanta, all because of a misunderstanding during his entrance interview, eight years during which he seems to have slipped through the cracks. Ernest's name is nowhere in the files in the basement of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.
BRANTLEY: Do you remember how authorities in Atlanta described to you what you were like being a detainee, like, what that meant? Like, how did you comprehend what that meant, being in a prison but being considered a detainee?
ACIEGO-MORE: (Speaking Spanish). How can you explain that to me, to be a detainee but not a prisoner?
GUERRERO: Not a prisoner. Every step of the way, he felt that he was living in a justice limbo, so to speak, because he was not a prisoner, but all of his fundamental rights were coerced. Every time they moved him from one location to the other, they did that in shackles. So they kept him in chains the whole time. No one actually gave him any explanation of what the difference between a prisoner and detainee was.
BRANTLEY: You said that he - the negative impression set in when he began to realize he was going to be there a long time. When did that happen? Like, when did he first realize that this was not a temporary stay, that he was going to be there a long time?
GUERRERO: (Speaking Spanish).
ACIEGO-MORE: (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: He doesn't realize that at first. But he simply noticed that time was going by, and they were not going to release him. That's when...
GRACE: The whole reason we were sitting here in this room in Havana is because of a single sheet of paper. We had found Ernesto's name because in February 1985, just a couple of months after the list was announced, he wrote a letter to Judge Marvin Shoob. We were combing through a collection of letters to the judge, and there on a sheet of loose-leaf paper was a handwritten letter in broken English. He asked the judge to help him. He writes that he fears he might be among the 2,746 names on the list. And he was - only because his body was in the Atlanta federal pen in late 1984 when the list was drawn up.
After writing that letter to Judge Shoob, Ernesto remained at the prison for three more years. He was released only because of the riot at Atlanta in 1987. One of the concessions the Justice Department made to end the riot was to agree to review every detainee's record. And when they looked at Ernesto's record, they realized there was no justification for his detention, and they released him in 1988.
What did it feel like to be released after all those years?
ACIEGO-MORE: Oh, my God (laughter). You know, first time in the United States, in the street, watching everything, you know, doing a lot of things. (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: Everything was new for him. Everything was exciting. Suddenly, everything seemed possible.
ACIEGO-MORE: It seemed possible - (speaking Spanish).
(LAUGHTER)
GUERRERO: Just imagine what it would be like if you moved here without any money and then returned. That way, you get the idea.
ACIEGO-MORE: (Laughter).
GRACE: Ernesto settled in Miami and started a life. He got a job at a shoe factory. And when he went to the bank to open a checking account, he hit it off with the clerk who helped him. They got married soon after and had a daughter a year later. One day, Ernesto was pulled over by police, and they found cocaine on him. He was a first-time offender, but because it was crack cocaine, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, three years mandatory. When he had served his sentence, he was immediately detained by the INS. And because his name was on the list, because he was still considered an excludable, he was deported back to Cuba. He's been back 25 years and has had to watch his daughter grow up from afar.
ACIEGO-MORE: I would like to see my daughter. I would like to see my grandson, my granddaughter. I don't know my granddaughter. I don't know my grandson, you know? My granddaughter is 14 years old now. And my grandson is about 4 years old now. I left my daughter when she was 4 years old. I don't see my daughter anymore. I would like to see my daughter. I would like to, you know, feel like a father, you know? I hope one day - inshallah, I would like to be close to my family.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRANTLEY: Back at the very beginning, we told you how we'd become a little obsessed with the tension between our theater and our history, the story we tell ourselves about who we are, on the one hand, and the reality of what we've done, on the other. And that tension has framed this whole story, has framed our search to understand why these refugees were treated the way they were - deemed excludable, denied due process, indefinitely detained, imprisoned by the federal government and trapped by the stories that got told about them.
But spending time with these men in Cuba, hearing them tell their own stories, it was all a lot less abstract. They weren't really that interested in probing the complex contradictions at the heart of American identity. They had endured the consequences of those contradictions, and so it was all a lot more personal. Rafael told us he'd been in the belly of the beast in the U.S. Matias had an exit visa to nowhere. Ernesto just wanted to be reunited with his family. We had lots of questions for them but no good answers. It was time for us to leave Cuba. But before we did, we had one more person to try and find.
GRACE: Jorge Marquez Medina is the guy's name. And he did come back here in '91. He was repatriated. And then that's all we know about him, basically.
BRANTLEY: Jorge Marquez Medina, the leader of the Talladega uprising, the man who'd called the reporter Cynthia Corzo at El Nuevo Herald to tell her estamos amotinados - we've started a riot - the first person we'd searched for when we got the list.
GRACE: From the moment we started working on this story, we've wanted to talk to Jorge Marquez Medina not just because so many people we've interviewed remembered him but also because his name is everywhere in the files in the basement of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. Most of the detainees whose names we encountered there had maybe one folder dedicated to their legal efforts. Jorge had 17, and they were filled with court documents related to the lawsuits he filed against the federal government, reports of the hunger strikes he led at the Atlanta pen, handwritten letters in clean script to his lawyers and to judges and to reporters. And there were accounts of his life in Cuba before leaving on the boatlift, and according to those accounts, in 1980, Jorge was a law student in Havana, married with a 14-month-old daughter named Ana Giselle.
So the first place we're going to go is Jorge's old house.
BRANTLEY: One more. I think it's one more block.
GRACE: In Atlanta, we'd found the home address Jorge had given Cuban officials when they were processing it to leave on the boatlift, and that's the address we were pulling up to.
This is the street right here.
BRANTLEY: We knocked on the door, and a teenage girl answered. We explained as best we could what we were up to. Jorge Marquez Medina is my grandfather, she said, but you should talk to my mother, Ana Giselle. She's at work right now. So we called Ana Giselle. She agreed to meet for lunch. She didn't want to be recorded, but she talked openly about her life, told us about Jorge's return in 1991, how she met him really for the first time then and how they tried to start a relationship but also that his life here in Cuba as an excludable was hard and they couldn't really start fresh. And so, she told us, he'd left Cuba again in 1993 and eventually made his way to Canada. If we wanted to talk to Jorge, that's where we could find him - in Vancouver.
JORGE MARQUEZ MEDINA: Hello.
BRANTLEY: Hey, Jorge. Hello?
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Hello?
BRANTLEY: Jorge?
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Yeah.
BRANTLEY: Hey. It's Chip Brantley in Alabama.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Oh.
BRANTLEY: Hey. Did I wake you up?
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Yeah.
BRANTLEY: Sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry to wake you up. When can I try you back? Are you around this afternoon?
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Yeah. This afternoon, yeah, I'm going to be here.
GRACE: We emailed with Jorge for a couple of weeks before Chip made this phone call. Jorge had snuck back into the U.S., but his immigration status imperiled any sort of life he wanted to build here, so he had eventually made his way to Canada. He didn't sound especially eager to talk with us, but he seemed amenable enough - that was, until we started proposing dates, and he got a little cagey. Finally, we said, we're coming to Vancouver in two weeks, if you could just give us a couple of hours of your time. And he said he thought he should be there, thought it would work. So with only that vague promise to go on, we set off to Vancouver.
We got Jorge's address and found a place to stay with a view of his apartment building. We were preparing a stakeout if he stopped answering our messages. But on the morning we were supposed to meet, there he was, in the flesh - tall, deep-lined face, dark eyes, wearing a silver tracksuit - this man we tried to find in Cuba, this man whose extensive legal history had been sitting in the boxes of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, this man who had led the uprising in Talladega, had taken Linda Calhoun and the others hostage, this man, Linda had memorably told us in our first interview for this story, who had treated her with dignity and respect, who had been like her guardian angel.
BRANTLEY: Jorge invited us up to his apartment in a high-rise near the bay, and we took the elevator up to one of the middle floors. The apartment was very modest - one bedroom, a small balcony, a giant television connected to Jorge's computer, where he keeps in touch with his family in Cuba and life on the island through various social media channels. And it was here that we were going to finally come to understand the story of what happened in Talladega, the story of the men on the roof. But there was one small problem.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOVEBIRDS CHIRPING)
MARQUEZ MEDINA: (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: Jorge keeps two lovebirds, and lovebirds - well, they're not very conducive to clean audio interviews.
GRACE: I don't think we can record with the birds. This is not going to work, unfortunately.
BRANTLEY: Really?
GRACE: Yeah.
BRANTLEY: It's...
GRACE: Yeah.
BRANTLEY: Jorge said maybe we'd just reschedule for tomorrow, but everything felt so tenuous. We'd flown all the way here on a vague promise to do this one interview we'd wanted from the very beginning. So we went into hard sell mode.
GRACE: Our place is, like, three blocks from here.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Oh.
GRACE: It's very close. The top of that building right there...
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Right.
GRACE: That's where we're staying.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: All right.
BRANTLEY: So much for spycraft, so much for hiding our planned stakeout. But Jorge agreed, and soon enough, we'd relocated back to our place.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Most of my family was fighting with Castro in the mountains.
GRACE: Jorge was born in 1957, in the middle of the Cuban Revolution in Santiago de Cuba, the birthplace of the revolution.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: My father was a martyr of the revolution, brothers, uncles. Ironically, two of them were founder of the Communist Party, one with Che Guevara and another one with Camilo. And then most of the family moved to Havana.
GRACE: Jorge's father had died fighting in the mountains with Castro, and after the revolution was over, Jorge came with his mother to Havana in 1959 and really grew up alongside the new country.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: As a kid, for me, it was beautiful, you know? And the revolution had so many positive and beautiful things at the beginning. It was beautiful. It was beautiful.
GRACE: He went to Havana's best schools and joined the army at the age of 16. He became a sergeant and then took a leave to study law at the University of Havana. But by the late 1970s, Jorge was becoming a bit disenchanted with the direction of the country. Cuba had sent more than 35,000 soldiers to fight in Angola, and as Jorge saw dozens of classmates from his military academy die in the fighting there, he began questioning the aims of the revolution.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: To go to fight for something that you didn't belong to. If a American invade Cuba, and it is my country, and I have to take a weapon to defend it, I will. But if I'm not clear about the objectives, then it didn't have no purpose.
BRANTLEY: By 1979, Jorge was thinking even more about purpose because he'd gotten married and had a baby daughter, Ana Gisele, the one we'd met with in Cuba. And that same year is when Castro allowed the visits of the exiled Cubans from America, those gusanos, those worms who now return to the island as butterflies with their stories and their stuff.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: We were able to talk and speak with Cuban who has left before, and many of them came with several exaggerated bulls***s. They don't tell you the whole reality. But at least we got the impression that the workers - as a worker, you have a better life in the States than in Cuba.
BRANTLEY: Despite what Jorge calls the exaggerated bulls*** of some of the exiles, he got a glimpse into what life could be like for his family in the United States. The brother of a friend of his who had left Cuba some years before was now working at a restaurant in Miami Beach. He was by no means rich, but he was able to afford to take a couple of weeks off to come visit family in Cuba, and he brought gifts and stories of his life in Miami. Like so many Cubans, after those visits of the exiles, Jorge began imagining another life across the Florida Straits.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: How to escape Cuba - that's what I was thinking about. The only way out is exile, trying to make it better.
BRANTLEY: The only way out was exile. But there seemed to be no real opportunities to actually get off the island - that is, until April of 1980, when someone hijacked a bus and drove it to the gates of the Peruvian embassy.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: The first Friday, the 4 of April, I remember I wake up. I was going to pay a transit ticket. It was a few blocks from the embassy, and I had stopped for the newspaper. And in Granma newspaper was the - that Castro was going to take the guards out of the embassy. So I didn't went to pay the ticket. I went to the embassy.
GRACE: When Jorge arrived, Peruvian officials were stationed at the entrance, trying to keep Cubans from flooding onto the embassy grounds. And so Jorge and a group of other asylum seekers helped each other scale one of the embassy's walls. That first day, Jorge says, there were barely a hundred asylum seekers at the embassy. But by the end of the next day, there were 10,000 people crowded onto the grounds. Jorge's wife had planned to come join him at the embassy with their baby daughter, Ana Gisele.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: The one that you saw. She was 1 1/2 years old or something, and it was too dangerous inside the Peruvian embassy. I didn't want to expose the kid because we didn't know what was going to happen in there.
GRACE: We'd read about this in Jorge's legal filings. The details are almost cinematic. Jorge's wife comes to the embassy with the baby, Ana Gisele, to try and join him. But at that point, it's just a crush of people - total chaos. There's no way for her to get inside, so they stand there with the fence between them and deliberate whether the mother should hand the baby over the fence to Jorge. Ultimately, the mother decides, no, it's too risky. Jorge says the plan was for him to go on in the boatlift and then figure out a way to come back for his wife and daughter.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: We didn't know how it was going to end, but at least I have the opportunity to leave Cuba. The only way that I could create or try to create a better future for us was leaving. There was no other way around.
GRACE: Jorge was at the embassy for a few weeks before he was allowed to leave for Mariel. He arrived there in the late afternoon and was put aboard a sport fishing boat.
BRANTLEY: Had you been on boats a lot? Like, had you...
MARQUEZ MEDINA: No.
BRANTLEY: No.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: First time.
BRANTLEY: First time on a boat.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Right.
BRANTLEY: Were you scared?
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Yeah.
GRACE: I wonder what it was like to look at Cuba for the last time, I mean, for what could have been the last...
MARQUEZ MEDINA: It was some kind of - I cry because of the uncertainty of not knowing when I going to be able to come back, when I'm going to be able to meet with my family again.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARQUEZ MEDINA: The sun has come down already. It was getting dark. Everything was nice, perfect until about midnight. It was a bad weather situation. And I thought that I would never make it to Key West because the boat - the waves just went inside. And the wave were like mirrors. You know, I said - I thought it was going to collapse, and it was overcrowded. It was, like, crazy things, surreal. And so many people expecting a better future - all of us, I would say - am afraid, thinking that you wouldn't make it. And it turns out we made it. Nothing here could be worse than there.
GRACE: The crossing took all night, and Jorge was in Key West for only a few hours before being sent to Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. An uncle in Miami sponsored him out pretty quickly, and someone in his extended family had access to a boat he hoped could make the trip back to Mariel to get his wife and daughter. But then the boatlift was shut down. The window to get them out had closed. Jorge heard from friends that there were more job opportunities in New York. And so after a few months, he moved up north. One rainy night, he was out with friends in the Bronx. They'd all been drinking, and Jorge was driving, and he was involved in a terrible car accident in which two people died. He served 16 months in a New York state prison, was released early for good behavior. The day he was scheduled to be released, some relatives came to the prison to pick him up.
So tell - can you just describe that scene exactly? So you served your time. You think you're going to walk out of the prison that day, right?
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Right. My family - they were waiting for me outside. But immigration came inside the prison when I was getting dressed, and they handcuffed me and took me to Manhattan - INS detention center. The immigration took me to Atlanta that same night. They put me in a small plane with two or three more people, and I was sent to Atlanta.
BRANTLEY: How did they explain to you why you were not going to be released?
MARQUEZ MEDINA: 'Cause you're a criminal, and we don't want you here. Castro sent you, but we're going to send you back.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRACE: Jorge arrived at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in 1984 as the list of excludables was being negotiated.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Atlanta was like hell, really. There were several Cubans that we were friends, even from Cuba - never have any kind of mental problems or whatever. People lost their minds. I saw so many people became crazy, lost their mind completely. Atlanta was hell. It was horrible hell.
GRACE: While Jorge had served his sentence at the state prison in New York, he'd been able to enroll in college courses to learn English, to study American law. But when he got to Atlanta, he saw that the Cuban detainees were offered nothing in the way of education or training.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: So when I arrived to Atlanta in 1984, even though the Cuban has been there for about four years, we were not allowed to go to college. Cubans - you Cuban? No, forget about it. You're going to be deported. We won't spend money on you. They allowed the Americans to go to school, but not the Cubans.
GRACE: So soon after he arrived at the pen, Jorge went on a hunger strike to pressure the Bureau of Prisons to give Cuban detainees the same educational opportunities as the American prisoners in Atlanta. He went two weeks without eating before the prison started force-feeding him. Finally, after 63 days, prison officials gave in and allowed him and the other Cuban detainees access to courses offered by a local university.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: One of the course that I get in Mercer University, the one that - it was in political science. It was the role of the media in U.S. politics. The government are afraid of the media, and the media is some kind of, like, balance on the whole situation.
BRANTLEY: Jorge began corresponding with reporters. He'd write letters and make phone calls to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Times and reporters in Miami. One in particular in Miami - Cynthia Corzo, at El Nuevo Herald - he used to call regularly, and he would always call her directly. When news broke about the list of excludables, Jorge was sure that his name was on it. And given his reputation as an agitator, he felt certain that he would be among those first deported in early 1985. But in order to be repatriated, a detainee cannot have any open litigation in U.S. courts. So because of an ongoing case regarding his hunger strike, Jorge would remain in Atlanta. Radio Marti and the suspended migration agreement brought further reprieve. It wasn't until early 1991 - almost seven years after his name was placed on the list - that Jorge finally received his deportation notice.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: And then I ended up in Talladega.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARQUEZ MEDINA: You knew that it was - you were closer to Cuba when you arrived in Talladega.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BRANTLEY: And here we were again, back in Talladega. We'd come all this way to sit with this man who'd been rendered virtually stateless to hear his story about what had happened in rural Alabama in 1991.
GRACE: Jorge had tried everything to avoid being sent back to Cuba. He'd consulted with his legal aid attorneys, who he called a lone voice in the big desert of his indefinite detention. In handwritten court filings composed from his cell in Talladega, he submitted petitions to federal judges. He appealed his order of exclusion. And when those didn't work, he even tried to defer his deportation by way of a diagnosis of high cholesterol, but to no avail. And then came word of his imminent deportation flight.
BRANTLEY: So how did you know that this flight was going to happen?
MARQUEZ MEDINA: 'Cause they'd let you know a couple of days before.
BRANTLEY: So you knew a flight was going to happen the next day. And how did it all come about? I mean, how did you...
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Well, we were taken to the yard.
GRACE: On the morning of August 21, Jorge and two other detainees were taken to the rec yard of alpha unit. They had with them a screw from a crate of instant mashed potatoes and a handball. They threw the handball under the fence and then asked the guard to retrieve it. When the guard passed the ball back through the fence, Jorge and the other two men grabbed him and pulled him hard against the chain link. They pressed the screw against the guard's neck and grabbed his keys, brought him into the rec cage, took his uniform. One of the Cubans put it on and, posing as the guard, escorted the other detainee back to the door. Within minutes, they'd taken over alpha unit, put the hostages into one room and then started unlocking the other detainee's cells.
BRANTLEY: The Cubans met to figure out what to do next. Because Jorge spoke English, because he had studied the law and because he had good relationships with American reporters, the other detainees chose him as their leader. Jorge then went to the INS office to start making calls to the media. His first call was to Cynthia Corzo of El Nuevo Herald.
Do you remember making that call?
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Yeah. I just said, this is happening. We used - got some hostages. We don't want to go to Cuba. We were desperate, you know? That's the way it's going to be done.
BRANTLEY: He told her, this is our only option. We had to do something, and this was the only thing we could think of. Jorge hung up with Cynthia and started calling other reporters.
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Because we want that the press have access and record because it was the only way to get it out to the American public, our side of the story, you know.
BRANTLEY: And at what point did y'all get up on the roof and...
MARQUEZ MEDINA: Out from the roof? Going - when they cut the phones, because we got the phone use the first day. After that, we were incommunicado. There was no - I couldn't do nothing about it.
BRANTLEY: Without the phones, they couldn't speak to the press. And without the press, there was no way for them to be heard, no way for them to counter those old narratives about who they were - the dregs of Castro's jails, the undesirables, the scum, the legal fictions floating off the coast, not even here, the worst of the worst. Jorge had told us he always felt that if the American public could just see his face, then they'd better understand his story, and his fate might have been different. And so they went to the roof to be seen, to speak again about their condition, to say, we are here. Pray for us. And from the roof, Jorge could see a cluster of photographers perched on a hill a quarter-mile off. And it was Jorge Marquez Medina who composed a message on a bedsheet - please, media. Justice, freedom or death.
GRACE: There's an old adage about reporting, that you know you're done when you see yourself coming the other way, when you bump into yourself reporting out something you've reported out before. This is that moment in our story - the men on the roof holding bedsheets, the photographers on the hillside with their longest telephoto lenses. All this started with the photographs of the men on the roof, with us trying to make out their faces, trying to understand what had brought them from Cuba to a prison in rural Alabama, the incongruity of it all. In the photographs, the angle of view is very narrow, and the images are blurry, especially around the edges. And when that day had run its course, those photographs were tucked into manila envelopes, sent to a newspaper archive, where they sat for decades. And this story and those men had long been forgotten - because there's a burden to remembering, a convenience to forgetting. Sometimes it's just easier to look away.
BRANTLEY: WHITE LIES was reported, written and produced by the Alabama Ham Trio - Chip Brantley, Andrew Beck Grace and Connor Towne O'Neill. Liana Simstrom was our supervising producer, Annie Iezzi our associate producer. Robert Little edited the show, with help from Bruce Auster, Keith Woods, Christopher Turpin and Kamala Kelkar. Our incredible score was composed and performed by Jeff T. Byrd.
GRACE: Emily Bogle was senior visual editor. Barbara van Woerkem was our fact-checker. Caroline Drees is NPR's senior director of field safety and security. Thank you to Carl Craft and everyone in NPR's content operations. The audio engineer for this episode was Maggie Luthar. Thank you, Micah Ratner and NPR's legal team, and Tony Cavin, NPR's standards and practices editor. Our project manager is Margaret Price. Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of NPR's Storytelling Unit. And Anya Grundmann is NPR's senior vice president for programming and audience development. We are grateful to Radiohead for the use of their song, "The National Anthem," courtesy of XL Recordings and Warner Chappell Music. Special thanks to Edith Chapin, Didi Schanche, Tara Neill, Eyder Peralta, Collin Laverty, Anne Hindman, Luis Barrios, Elliott Young, Mark Dow, Abby Rubin, Shaelyn Smith, Maria Beddingfield, Johanna Obenda, Tom Arenberg and Russel Peterson.
BRANTLEY: This is the last episode of Season 2 of WHITE LIES. Thank you for listening.
Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.