A tale of faith, courage, and finally, truth

Published Saturday, October 11, 1997, in the Miami Herald

A tale of faith, courage, and finally, truth

She was your typical working-class Cuban mother from Hialeah, a face in the masses, 33 years old, a pharmacy cashier at Sedano's with a husband and a 13-year-old daughter. She was like your cousin or your cousin's in-law, or just about everyone else in Hialeah, uninvolved in political movements, an anonymous face in the daily grind.

If the average traveler to Cuba had a face, it might be hers. If her particulars sound familiar, it's because everybody knows somebody who travels to Cuba, laden with letters, clothes and medicine for loved ones, drawn there by blood ties. After all, these are not fictional characters, the Cuban travelers. They are people like Ileana Iraeta Fleites, everycubana.

And that is what makes what happened to her all the more astounding. Iraeta wound up living a Cuban version of Midnight Express.
But unlike the protagonist in that film, she insists she carried nothing illegal in her bags. Still, this woman from Hialeah would spend five months in a bulb-lit cell at Havana's state security headquarters, Villa Marista.

She would be subject to psychological bombardment, exposed to the suffering of jailed Cuban dissidents, cut off from her family in the United States. She would face the possibility of a death sentence, as bomb after bomb rattled hotels in the capital.

The Cubans claimed she was a terrorist trying to smuggle explosives in her shoulder bag. That's ludicrous, she says, now home safe and still shaken. She says her bag contained clothes, six letters for close friends and relatives, some candy for her nephew's birthday, and medication for her congenital kidney condition.

Throughout her ordeal, Iraeta would lose 33 pounds, her hair by clumps, her sleep, but never her sense of self or her faith. In five months, she would read the Bible from the book of Genesis to the book of Revelation. Deep within her nightmare, she says she repeated the same prayers each night. The most fervent one was for her mother, who waited in anguish across the Florida Straits.

``Please God, give my mother health and strength and never diminish her hope.'' Iraeta knew that everything would work out if her mother stayed strong. She would close her eyes and imagine her mother's face. She remembered the most important thing her mother taught her -- courage. It was the same kind of courage she was trying to teach her own daughter, Geily.

At home in Hialeah, in her bed at night, 64-year-old Georgina Beltran would close her eyes and see her daughter's face.

``I would feel a kind of telepathy with Ileana. I could hear her say, `Mami, I want to see you healthy and strong when I return,' '' Iraeta's mother said Friday, three days after her daughter returned from her 158-day ordeal.

``I have suffered interminable days quietly, but the more I suffered, the more hope I had,'' she said.

From Havana to Hialeah and back, the meditations were linked by a conviction that the truth would come out in the end, proving Iraeta's detention had been a mistake. And, without word on Tuesday, the day before her father's birthday, Iraeta was allowed to fly home. She says she said goodbye to Cuba.

Back home, she hugged her mother. She reveled in her husband's embrace and her daughter's smile. The day after the TV cameras left, Iraeta went for a medical checkup and a facial. Shaking away the flashbacks, she took in the sights of her city, the faces of its workers, the anonymous echoes of Cuba. Around town, people packed bags for Havana. It was just another day in Hialeah.