Yosleidi Sigler Amaya

The Airbus A319 descended through the rainy overcast clouds off the South Florida coast and banked to the left only a few thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean. Looking out the window I could see the faint glow of lights from the Miami skyline ahead of us piercing through the scud, a familiar sight I have seen many times before. Within minutes the beauty of the Miami skyline came into its full splendor and glory providing the passengers on the airplane a rare opportunity to see Miami illuminated by both its city lights and the short-lived glow left behind by the setting sun. At that moment, as I marveled at the beauty from the air my home city offers both its returning residents and its arriving visitors, I realized this was the same view Yosleidi Sigler Amaya experienced just a little while earlier.

Yosleidi is the only daughter of Guido Sigler Amaya, brother to Miguel and Ariel Sigler Amaya, and one of the eleven Cuban prisoners of conscience still imprisoned in a Castro gulag for refusing to accept banishment and forced exile as a condition to his release. Earlier that morning, Miguel Sigler Amaya had called and invited me to join him and his family at Miami International Airport to welcome his niece and her two daughters who would be arriving from Cuba later that afternoon. Unfortunately, my flight back home would be arriving after theirs, and I would not be able to join them and share that special moment.

It was not until Saturday afternoon that the opportunity arrived for me to sit down with Yosleidi at her uncle’s home and ask her about her trip to Miami and her experiences in Cuba. Remembering the view out the window as my flight made its final approach into Miami I asked her how she felt when she looked out the window of the plane and saw the city for the first time. “It was… I don’t know…” She paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “Beautiful,” she finally answered, “just beautiful. I never imagined it would be so pretty.”

Yosleidi arrived with her two young daughters, Claudia who is ten, and Elizabeth who is only four. The two girls played in the yard with their cousins while I spoke to their mother, seemingly oblivious to the drastic change their lives had taken only two days earlier. They laughed and carried on as children always do, while their brave mother, unable to hide the pain in her eyes, told me about the life of oppression and fear they left behind in Cuba.

At 29 years of age, Yosleidi was never allowed to attend college or given permission to work. As a member of the Sigler Amaya family, she was born into the opposition movement and labeled persona non grata by the Castro regime. Privileges such as work and education are reserved only for those who the dictatorship deems worthy, and anyone seeking freedom and liberty is not worthy in their eyes. Life has always been tough for Yosleidi, as it has been for all members of the opposition in Cuba, but her last weeks in Cuba proved to be some of the most difficult.

She decided to come to Miami with her daughters on the insistence of her imprisoned father. Because of his activism, that of her uncles, her husband, as well as her own, life had become dangerous and unbearable on the island. Knowing that its attacks on the adults of the Sigler Amaya family did little to curtail their activities against tyranny, the Castro regime began to target her older daughter, Claudia. Every day in the schoolyard older kids were sent to pick on her and beat her up. In the cafeteria, the harassment was endless, and it came to the point that Claudia refused to go to school.

I then asked her about her father, Guido, and if she had an opportunity to visit him before she left. Yosleidi said she was able to visit him on January 3rd, the Monday before their flight. She described his condition as delicate and getting worse. The Castro prison officials have taken away his medication in retaliation for his refusal to accept the conditions imposed upon his release by the regime and the Catholic Church. His health, she said, is worsening day by day.

Yosleidi then began to describe the constant vigilance her and her daughters were subjected to. The strange and threatening men that would stand around their home and terrorize them every time they walked by. Telling her father Guido about this only strengthened his resolve for her to leave Cuba and travel to Miami with his only grandchildren to be with her uncles and her husband, a democracy activist also who was forced to leave Cuba three years earlier. As is always the case with the Castro dictatorship, receiving permission to leave the Castro slave plantation is a difficult and uncertain process, and it proved no different for her and her children. The much-envied “white card,” the official document required to exit the island, came only three days before their departure.

Throughout our conversation, I noticed Yosleidi appeared distant and unsure of herself. I asked her if the past few days seemed surreal to her, difficult to believe. “I still have not gotten used to the fact that I’m here,” she answered. “It all feels like a dream. Every once in a while I pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming.”

I asked her how the girls were taking to their new surroundings, and how they reacted to seeing their father for the first time in three years. She replied that the girls were ecstatic to be with their father once again, and how the two of them watched the girls sleep their first night in Miami, amazed at how happy and content they were. “They were sleeping better and happier than they have been able to in a long time,” Yosleidi remarked.

To conclude our short conversation, I asked Yosleidi what had affected her the most since arriving in Miami besides reuniting with her husband and uncles. “It’s the air,” she replied without hesitation, “the air here is different.” I inquired what she found different about it. “It’s just different,” she answered, “it’s the air of liberty.”