FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: Benedictine teacher Vladimir De Cardenas fled Cuba for freedom

Vladimir De Cardenas, who is in his first year at Benedictine Military School as a Spanish teacher, was repeatedly tortured in a jail cell by police officers, sometimes as many as four times in a week, in communist Cuba from July 12, 2021, until Dec. 2, 2022. They punched and slapped him, and spit in his face, for being among thousands of peaceful protestors during widespread antigovernment demonstrations in July 2021.

“I went to the police station starting that day, and three or four times every week since July 12, 2021, until Dec. 2, 2022 – three days before I left (for the United States),” said De Cardenas, 47, who spent the past two years teaching Spanish at Hancock Day School in Savannah, Ga. "They kept coming to my house and taking me to the police station, and they would torture me. I went through a lot of torture. I can take a lot. I just took it in. But it was a lot. They knew I could fight. Their plan was to trigger me into fighting them and so every time they put me in a cage, a little cell with a chair in the middle. No handcuffs. And they would send the two same police officers every time to spit in my face and to kick me and to slap my face and to say they would rape my wife and (say) they would beat my brother and my nephews, and (say) a guy from the secret police officers would put me in jail, and (say) they would send a guy from the secret police to make my wife in love with him, and (say) he would be my son’s stepfather and beat him and mistreat him. So it was not just physical abuse but emotional and psychological torture. But I would tell them every time, ‘I know your game. You know I’m a lawyer. You know I know what you’re doing and it’s not going to happen. I am not going to fight you. You can slap me. You can kick me and punch me as much as you want. I’m good with it. I’m smarter than you.’ And that would make them even angrier. They wanted me to fight so they had a reason to put me in jail.”

Cuba has had a socialist political system since 1961 based on the “one state, one party” principle. The country is constitutionally defined as a single-party Marxist-Leninist socialist republic with semi-presidential powers. Reports and human rights documentation over the past several years show that the Cuban government has consistently used violence and repression against protestors. The most widely reported incidents of government violence against protestors occurred during widespread anti-government demonstrations in July 2021. Thousands of Cubans took to the streets in the largest nationwide demonstrations against the government since the 1959 Cuban revolution. The peaceful protests were a response to longstanding restrictions on rights, food, and medicine scarcity, and the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“On July 11, 2021, there was a nation-wide protest,” said De Cardenas, who was born in Cuba and earned a law degree from Fructuoso Rodriguez University said. “It wasn’t planned by any organizations. It was just a random situation because we were living back in the moment with COVID-19 and electricity was still going off, having 16, 18 hours of blackouts every day. Because of the blackouts there was a lack of medicine, food, electricity. And during the pandemic, too, so a lot of people went out to protest. In a matter of two hours, the whole country was out on the streets requesting freedom. We wanted change.

“At some point after we started everyone was exhausted,” he continued. “Everyone didn’t really know what else to do so everybody just went home. The government had sent people to the protest to film everybody who was involved. That’s how we got targeted. The next day, they started to chase us down.”

The U.S. State Department and other human rights groups have reported incidents of arbitrary or unlawful killings by Cuban security forces. Multiple reports document severe mistreatment of detained protestors, including torture, beatings, extended solitary confinement, and sleep deprivation. Cuban courts have sentenced hundreds of protestors to disproportionately long prison terms, sometimes through military courts.

According to the U.S. State Department, arbitrary arrests and short-term detentions increase and became a routine Cuban government method for controlling independent public expression and political activity. The government frequently detained activists without informing them of any charges against them. As a result of the July 11 protests, the number of arbitrary arrests rose steeply, with 5,000 to 8,000 arrests and detentions, according to estimates by the NGO Cuban Prisoners Defenders.

Fidel Castro ruled Cuba from 1959 until his death in 2008. His brother, Raul Castro, and president Miguel Diaz-Canel are now in control. “Cuba is a Castro family business,” De Cardenas said.

De Cardenas, who is a muscular 6 feet tall and 218 pounds, loves to work out with weights. He is trained in Taekwondo and kung fu.

“Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to mask my appearance because I always look big,” he said. “I’m from a small town so everybody kind of knows who I am. It was easy for them to identify me. And my house is two blocks from the police station. After every time they put me through that, when they would release me the next day, that day or the day after that when the bruises would kind of clear up, I would go out during the blackouts at night and paint posters on the walls of my hometown, protesting without being seen to make the people realize that we need to fight. They didn’t know I was doing it. They knew someone was painting posters, but they didn’t know it was me. Otherwise, yeah, they could put me in jail. That’s one of the reasons I shouldn’t go back to Cuba. Back in my early 20s, I used to fight illegally for money. I was young and naive. They were trying to trigger me, to have an excuse to put me in jail. But I knew what the game was that was being played.

“Some guys disappeared,” he continued. “A lot of young people disappeared after July 11 (2021) and the families never knew anything about them, to this day. It’s not old news. It’s still happening in Cuba to this day. Che Guevara, lots of people wear hats and shirts, and they don’t know that guy was a murderer. He was a cold-blooded murderer. In Cuba, it’s all one. The police, the national assembly, the military, business, everything is run by the government, which is run by the Castro family. Right now, there is a president (Diaz-Canel) who is a puppet leader. He’s a puppet for the Castro family. All benefits go to the Castro family.”

De Cardenas said he earned a law degree “primarily with the purpose of knowing the consequences of the political actions I was going to take against the Cuban communist regime, and to know exactly what we – me and my colleagues – could and could not do, constitutionally speaking, in order to be able to stand for ideas and beliefs without crossing a line that would put us in jail. They just showed up at my door the first time and then they kept doing it for almost two years. They didn’t even have papers. They just showed up at your door and said, ‘You need to come with us.’ And I told my friends, ‘They are going to come for us. Just know that you cannot say no. You have to go peacefully. Don’t offer any resistance. Just go with it and you’ll be fine because what we’re doing is constitutionally correct, so we don’t have any trouble. But if you fight back, if you resist, that would be an excuse. They would go for that. And some of them did. And people would go to jail for seven or eight years.”

De Cardenas said he never had to go to a hospital as a result of the beatings he received. “It was very physical, but it was more punching and slapping and psychological, and the spitting on my face.”

The Cuban government uses arbitrary detention to harass and intimidate critics. Security forces routinely arrest independent journalists, activists, and others who protest against the Cuban government. Protests are triggered by the country’s horrendous economic situation, including persistent blackouts, inflation, and shortages of food and medicine. As a result, Cubans must wait in long lines and search daily for the most basic necessities.

“They modified the constitution back in 1997 to ensure there wouldn’t be any possibility for the people to change the political system,” De Cardenas said. “The Cuban people have been brainwashed for decades. Since you are in first grade, you go to the school and all you see is pictures of the president, pictures of the Castros, and it’s all about brainwashing the people to believe that that is the right thing to do, to follow the lead of the government. You are told what to eat in Cuba. You don’t even have the freedom to decide what to eat because you don’t have access.

“People steal from the government to support their families,” he continued. “That’s the reality of Cuba. Teachers, they go to the school and they take the notebooks that they are supposed to give to the students, and the pencils and the erasers, and everything that they are given to give to the students, they give (the students) very little and they take the rest and sell it on the black market to the same parents to make extra cash. That happens at every job in Cuba. Doctors, engineers, everybody. When I tell you everybody, trust me. Everybody.”

Finally, De Cardenas decided he could no longer take the abuse.

“There was a divine intervention, or something, that some people might think is crazy,” he said. “One night, in the middle of the blackout, my son, we didn’t have a generator, and I was sitting with my son inside the house, and he said, ‘Daddy, why don’t we have a generator?’ And I said, ‘You know what? We’re going to have one one day.”

De Cardenas pauses. Tears well in his eyes. His upper body begins to shake as he attempts to catch his breath.

“A couple of days after that we were walking, trying to get food or something, I don’t know, and he saw a police officer like a block away and he said, ‘Daddy, maybe that guy is looking for you,’” De Cardenas said. “He was like 6 years old or 7. ‘What happens if he comes and gets you and I’m here all alone?’ I said, ‘No, don’t worry. He’s not coming for me. He’s doing something else. We’re good.’ At that point, I realized my son was getting traumatized by that situation. Even when I left, peacefully, every time he saw the police taking me away. That night, I started praying to God. I said, ‘God, I can’t take this anymore. I really need a way out. I don’t know how this is going to happen, but I really need to put a stop to all of this.’ A couple of days after that, I have a friend in Spain, she’s a very good friend of mine, and she called me just to say hey. She asked me what was up, and I told her what was going on. She said, ‘Last night, I had a dream about you.’ This woman, we had a platonic relationship when we were younger. She was in Spain. I was (in Cuba). She said, ‘I had a dream about you last night.’ And then she described two old people. She described my parents with details (and she had never met them). She said, ‘The woman was crying and asking me to take you out of Cuba because you are going to jail if you continue doing what you are doing. I woke up. I went to work. And I could not get that out of my head. That’s why I’m calling you to tell you this.’”

De Cardenas said his friend in Spain asked a bank for a loan. Then she told him to locate a “coyote,” a human smuggler who guarantees a successful journey for immigrants to other countries.

“I found a coyote who would do that for me, and she would pay the money from Spain,” De Cardenas said. “And that’s the very short story of how I got here. I flew from Cuba to Nicaragua, and then the next day with coyote guys, they put you in the car and you start crossing borders until you get to the U.S. I went from Nicaragua all the way up to Honduras in one day. Then across Honduras the next day. Then we stayed on the border in Guatemala one day and one night, and then the next night we crossed Guatemala. So dangerous. My God. And by the end of that day, we got to Mexico. In Mexico, I spent two weeks in a safe house.

“After one week in the house, I found out the coyote was lying about the papers,” he continued. “We needed papers to continue. And then I found out about another coyote who was more expensive, but he would put me on a plane that this other guy had. It was like a movie. He was more expensive, but he could get it done with the Mexican authorities he had in his pocket. I talked to him on the phone. You never see the guy’s face. You never have direct contact with the boss. Only phone. He put me on a plane the week after that. At the airport, they show you a fake sign that you have to do so they recognize that you are with that coyote. You don’t even need a passport. They have a picture of you but if you don’t do the sign, you get pulled out. You have to do the sign. On the plane I crossed Mexico to Mexicali and the next morning they delivered us to the cartel in Mexico because they run the border and they want their (financial) cut. The coyotes don’t control that territory, so they deliver the people to the cartel, and they take it from there. It’s a movie. My friends keep telling me that I should write a script and make a movie.”

The cartel drove De Cardenas and his group to a border wall between Mexico and the U.S.

“Walk straight for 20 minutes and you will get to the bridge and the American immigration authorities will be waiting for you,” he said. “And that’s what it was. At that point you are in America. Everybody calls to their families and does Facetime. ‘I made it! I’m here!’ It was a big line. There were maybe 3,000 people there. It’s a long process.”

De Cardenas said his entry into the U.S. was legal. His dream is to become an American citizen and he has begun the naturalization process.

“If you get to American territory by crossing private property, yeah, then you committed a crime entering the U.S.,” he said. “That’s what happens when you have a coyote who does not know what he is doing, or he is trying to sneak out on the cartel and not pay. This guy knew what he was doing. You enter the U.S. and start your immigration process. After a year and a day, if you have not committed a crime, you can apply for permanent residency. For Cubans it is different because we have the Cuban Adjustment Act, which permits that a Cuban person being in the U.S. without committing any crime can get a green card. I came and applied for political asylum so I could have a work permit as soon as possible so I could work legally. I got it in June 2023, a couple of days after my birthday. That was the best birthday gift.

“The coyote I gave money to got me into the U.S. legally, fortunately,” he continued. “That’s one of the things you ask first. The money wasn’t even mine. I’m paying back right now, sending my friend money in installments. And you don’t know what’s going to happen to you in that situation. You don’t know if they’re going to kill you. You have to be ready all the time. You have to be alert all the time. You don’t if it’s about to get ugly and you just have to take off.”

After a year and a day, De Cardenas applied for a green card and got it. His son, Alain Gabriel De Cardenas, was 7 when he left Cuba. He has not seen him in person in nearly three years.

“We only Facetime every day,” De Cardenas said. “I haven’t been with my son … it’s going to be three years in December. Once you get the green card you can apply for the family to be reunified with you in the U.S., for them to fly to be with you legally here. Once they get here then they are granted a green card as soon as they get here. And just because you have a green card does not mean you are free. You can be targeted. It’s happening right now here in America. I’m not too worried because I have a lot of people backing me up but if it happens, I have a green card, and they have to let me go.”

De Cardenas said his biggest regret was not kissing his son goodbye at the airport. It haunts him every night.

“We went to go to the airport,” he said. “When I knew I was leaving … my son and I are very close … I was always with my son. I was the one picking him up from school, cooking for him, taking him to play. I bathed him. Feeding him dinner. Putting him in bed. I had to lie with him every night so he would fall asleep and even after I snuck out of his bed he would wake up and go to my bed and sleep next to me. So when I found out I was leaving I spent weeks crying every day for hours because I was leaving my son behind. It was painful.

“Just before (the airport), I told him I was leaving, that I was going to another country to give him a better life,” De Cardenas continued. “Stuff like that because he wouldn’t understand the political part. I was trying to make him understand. When we went to the airport … that’s something that kills me every night … I didn’t want him to see me crying because I didn’t want him to feel any pain … and I just jumped out of the car and walked away. And I didn’t kiss my son goodbye. That’s really painful. I was so stupid. I’m sorry for the word. That was really stupid of me to do.”

At this point, De Cardenas breaks down in tears. He pauses for several seconds before continuing.

“I think about how would my son feel about me leaving him behind without kissing him goodbye?” he said. “He understands.”

De Cardenas has considered attempting to meet his son, as well as his wife and stepson, in the Dominican Republic for a brief visit.

“I could fly him to the Dominican Republic and go meet him there but that represents a money expense that I don’t want to have because I have a plan in my mind to save enough money to buy a nice home and start my path here in America,” he said. “I have to think about putting him in a good school when he goes to high school. Hopefully, he can come to BC, which is the best school in Savannah. I’m so looking forward to that moment.”

In the meantime, De Cardenas’ son will continue to live with his mother and stepbrother. They live next door to De Cardenas’ brother and his sons (De Cardenas' nephews).

“It’s an apartment divided in two,” he said. “I support them financially. I take care of all of them. My son, my stepson, and their mom are all coming to join me at some point in the future. My brother and my two nephews, that’s a different story.”