The Questions We Don’t Ask

My father spent six years in prison. He served four of those years in the prison on Tacarigua Island, which they call the Alcatraz of Venezuela — a place that, according to him, was sordid and mysterious, with barbed wire, spiders, worms, and a penetrating smell of sea breeze.

He was arrested in 1962 when he was 20 years old. He was on a mountain with other guerrilla comrades of the communist youth, preparing to revolt against the government. Shortly before, a friend had been killed during a transport strike, and he hoped to avenge him. The Cuban Revolution had just taken place, and he dreamed of change. He was tried for armed rebellion.

“It’s starting to get dark; the first day on Tacarigua Island is over. How many are left? When will this nightmare end?” he re asking himself.

Before writing the introduction to this book, my dad and I had never talked about this topic. So one day, I decided to ask him.

It was, no doubt, a painful but healing conversation.

“I went through a great deal of suffering,” he told me. “There’s something about the prison guards and the helplessness and the fear,” he added.

In prison, he went on hunger strikes. He even wore two pairs of pants to minimize the impact of the baton beatings from the guards. He had cellmates who were beaten in the back and ended up convulsing.

Years later, he wrote that men in prison are no strangers “to sadness and pride, longing and dreaming, helplessness and fear, impatience and commitment, anger and love, melancholy and hatred, waiting.”

He told me about visits from relatives like my grandmother, who would travel on weekends on an unstable boat to bring him packages of food.

In Tacarigua, in an attempt to escape, he and a group of prisoners tried to dig a 656-foot-long tunnel starting from the mouth of a toilet, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

My dad also spoke to me about how time seemed to slow down, using phrases like “time suspended in prison” and “time standing still.”

The days, he re, were rainy and monotonous. He saw constellations tattooed on the ceilings of the cells, where in reality there were vulgar patches of peeling paint on a leaking roof.

In prison, he made great friends, with whom he still meets periodically today. “Our strength to resist,” he said, depended “on a high degree of camaraderie.” But what he emphasized most during our call was the books he read.

“What do you most 13 about those years?” I asked.

In a low voice, with a slight tremor from the Parkinson’s disease he has at 82, he responded, “In prison, I became a great reader.”

He then proceeded to list them: “War and Peace,” “The Magic Mountain,” “The Quiet Don,” “Don Quixote” and “The Steppenwolf.”

My father was released from prison with a commutation of sentence that required him to go into exile.

“It’s almost impossible to put into words the emotional impact of my first day of freedom.” He says that on that day, he discovered the miniskirt — or more precisely, women’s great legs — because at the time he was imprisoned, they were not worn.

He also tasted whiskey for the first time and wore the most expensive suit he had ever worn in his life.

He returned to Caracas, his hometown, at the age of 29. It was difficult to hear him talk about returning to his old neighborhood and finding that the house of his youth no longer existed.

His girlfriend hadn’t waited for him either. “Prisoners know that romantic love rarely stands the test of bars. ... Almost nowhere else but in prison does a person feel such a strong need for the company of a loved one who re them, writes to them, brings them an orange every Sunday, and above all, believes in them when many others doubt.”

Prison, he says, hardened him a lot. He was “no longer the same” — none of them were.

“Most of the faces had lost their youthful freshness,” he said. “There had also been a slow mutation in our spirit, in our way of understanding reality, in our way of translating dreams.”

The fear of being incarcerated again has haunted him throughout his life. “It still impacts me,” he its. He suffers from frequent nightmares and restless sleep, remnants of his nights in captivity.

At the age of 31, two years after returning from exile, my father, Eduardo Liendo, wrote “El Mago de la cara de vidrio,” his best-known novel and one of the most reprinted in Venezuelan and Latin American literature. He later became a university professor and writer and has since published 12 novels, as well as books of essays and short stories. One of his works, “Los Topos,” delves into his prison experience. Writing became his life’s mission, a way to redeem himself and find meaning in his time in prison. Through his writing, he learned to appreciate his achievements and endure his failures. From prison, he says, he also gained experiences that strengthened and disciplined his character.

“Nothing can replace the loss of freedom, but we must maintain faith and persevere. Tomorrow the sun will rise,” he wrote. “There is always tomorrow.”

About Portraits of a New Beginning

Between 2019 and 2020, Tamoa Calzadilla, Ana María Carrano, David Maris, María Gabriela Méndez and I documented the stories of 23 Hispanic men and women in California, Arizona and Florida who had been in jails or prisons, reintegrated into society and started a new life.

We took portraits of them and asked about their lives before their arrest, how they spent their time while incarcerated, what the first 24, 48 and 72 hours after their release were like, and what helped them stay out of incarceration. This book is the result of those encounters and the interviews conducted during that time.

We also interviewed academics, individuals working in organizations ing the reintegration process and correctional system personnel.

This publication is part of the Second Chance project carried out by Univision with from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. We published over 50 articles in Spanish and English on the Univision Noticias website, and we recorded documentaries and interviews and broadcast them on local and national TV and radio. Additionally, we published hundreds of social media posts, such as Facebook Lives, reaching over 50 million people with a message of inclusion, hope and opportunity. Furthermore, we offered a six-month journalism training scholarship to six Latinos who had been in jail or prison.

When we first started, we created a glossary of in Spanish to ensure that we avoided stigmas and stereotypes when discussing individuals reentering society.

Our primary goal was to always use the words “individuals” or “people” when referring to:

• Individuals who were incarcerated

• Individuals who were in prison or jail

• Individuals who were deprived of liberty

• Individuals who were detained

• Individuals who were prosecuted or convicted.

In interviews, we made a conscious effort to refrain from asking about the crimes the individuals committed. We only included this information in the book when they felt it was essential to tell their story.

In October 2019, we launched an online survey asking, “We are interested in knowing your story. Did you recently get out of prison or do you know someone who has recently been released and wants to share their experience?” Within a few hours, we received hundreds of responses from people who wanted to share their experiences. That is how we obtained some of the testimonials.

Many stories are heartbreaking and full of regret and pain.

But there are more stories of redemption, resilience and faith. There are those of great friendships made in prison, of vocations found, of family reunifications, of marriages strengthened by distance.

To our surprise, some told us that in their first week of freedom, they wanted to go back to prison.

The challenges of reintegrating into the professional world when you have a criminal record, they mentioned, are enormous: “Looking for a job, looking for a place to live — nothing is easy out here,” Chacha Quiñones told us.

Those who managed to find a mission, a sense of purpose, found a way to reintegrate.

This is the case of Marianne Diaz, in Hawaiian Gardens, California, who founded Clean Slate and has dedicated over 20 years to helping predominantly Latino individuals who have been released from prison remove gang-related tattoos through laser treatments.

But it’s more than that. With the laser, she also tries to help them erase the pain of the past: burning it, disintegrating it and pulverizing it, so that no traces remain.

“For many, tattoos speak of a time in their lives when they suffered and used violence as a form of expression,” Marianne said. “It’s emotional freedom that they get when we get rid of 17 the tattoo.”

In 1995, Marianne began erasing her own tattoos, which told the story of her involvement as a gang member since the age of 13. The tattoos were located on her hands, arms and legs. To remove them, she used sandpaper, but they still have some ink remaining.

“Because of my personal experience, I have dedicated my life to helping others reinvent themselves,” she explains.

Marianne wants people to rediscover who they are now that they have made amends for their mistakes when they see their ink-free skin again.

After we completed the interviews for this book and began editing the texts and photographs, the pandemic started. We had to pause the project, but we stayed in touch with some of the experts and interviewees.

Three years later, when we resumed the project, I realized that there was one person I had never asked about his experience of being in prison or what it was like for him when he was released. So I reached out to him.

Go to the homepage of the book “Portraits of a New Beginning.”