Dr. Manuel Artime Bueza

              Civilian Leader of the Bay of Pigs Invasion



                         

WAR MARCHES AND PRISON SONGS


       INTRODUCTION


      This is a book that I wrote on the bare and moldy walls of the jail in which I was incarcerated.

      It is a book of poems.



ach and every one of them has special meaning for those who lived the tragedy of the communist prisons. Some of these poems were written in moments of profound significance. One of them, "THE PRAYER ON THE EVE," I wrote on the day that I was informed of  my death sentence. Almost all of these poems had been committed to memory by me and some of my comrades during our incarceration and from these memories the poems were written once we were freed.

    My poems have little literary value. But they have great human value; the value of suffering.

    For this reason this book is sometimes sad, often melancholic, in certain occasions ironic and possibly, in some of the stanzas, one may discovered traces of healthy emotion escaping from those who have suffered much. But this is not a desperate book because its verses vibrate with hope or with Christian acceptance. The suffering written in these stanzas do not all belong to me, only some.  And sometimes I asked myself at what point the tragedy and tears stopped being mine and became those of my brothers in prison; after all in the end, these poems are no more than a pale reflection of the great tragedy that befell us all: the enslavement of Cuba.


    Why have I published these verses? 


o make known the heroism of some of the thousands of martyrs who have written a piece of history with their blood. To keep alive the ideals, suffering, agony and concerns of a group of prisoners who passionately loved an idea. The freedom of their homeland. To make us aware that a lost battle is but one painful incident in the long and difficult road that will ultimately lead us to the glory of a free homeland or the tranquility of a dignified death.


    What do I hope to obtain from this book?

  
  A better understanding of the Cuban tragedy and the heroic behavior of the Assault Brigade 2506.  A spiritual affinity of those of us that were freed with those that are still left behind suffering a slow agony in the communist dungeons. Or who knowsƒmaybe my poems will tug at the heart of an honest Cuban whose eyes will overflow with rage or maybe they will cause slow tears to slide down the rosy cheeks of a beautiful Cuban woman.

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