Independent journalist José Gabriel Barrenechea Chávez, a prominent Cuban intellectual, was arbitrarily arrested on November 8 after participating in peaceful protests in Encrucijada, his municipality of residence. His whereabouts remained unknown until November 11, when Pastor Mario Felix Lleonart confirmed that he was being held at the State Security headquarters in Santa Clara. The Cuban regime accuses him of sedition, attributing to him the leadership of the November 7 demonstrations. The following text was sent by Barrenechea from prison.

According to Torrente Ballester, in order to make us understand at what point in his life Alonso Quijano found himself, as he set out to undo wrongs and tilt windmills, the last tramway usually passes for the man at the beginning of his sixth decade, that of the fifties.

From that moment on, the only thing left to do is to prepare oneself for death and the old age that precedes it. Therefore, man launches himself into the last attempt to realize the dreams and ideals of his youth; or with evident desperation, not to let those opportunities that at dusk pass through the station of our days escape.

Unlike the young man, for the fifty-year-old there is not a second to waste. To delay a moment longer the realization of his ideals and dreams of youth, to let slip those last opportunities that still pass within reach of his legs and hands, is simply intolerable for the man who has turned the half-century mark yesterday, and is fully aware of what it means to have reached that critical age. Beyond, at a short distance from that youthful luxury, laziness, carelessness in the face of the passing of time, old age, and the slow or rapid fading of what we are, stalks us inexorably.

It is in this temporal circumstance, in the unappealable character of those beginnings of the fifties, which is explained by the audacity of the fifty-year-old nobleman, who throws his estate and his life overboard, to realize in himself an ideal, that of the superhero of his time, the knight-errant, the Amadis. But also that mature man, who abandons his home of years, to cast his lot with a new companion, who seems closer to his dreams and ideals, and who has suddenly appeared to him around any corner, when he did not expect such a thing.

In short, the certainty that there will be no more trains, that the branch of his days will be abandoned at any coming dawn, perhaps tomorrow, explains those leaps into the void that usually occur at this age, incomprehensible to those who have not yet lived, or at any rate, or at any rate no longer live this second adolescence. It is only when we are here at this age that we begin to understand and we stop laughing at Don Quixote, overwhelmed to feel ourselves in the shoes of that good nobleman, who dares to try not to let his last tramway escape…

_{*Machine translation proofread by Janaína da Silva.}