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CHIP BRANTLEY, HOST:
Previously on WHITE LIES...
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WILLIAM FRENCH SMITH: We have effectively lost control of our borders.
MYRON KRAMER: There's an issue here, which is we can't win even if we win.
DORIS MEISSNER: It was very difficult to know who was who without holding people for a while.
DOUG ROBERTO: These people were not in the United States.
MARVIN SHOOB: It just goes against the grain of all sense of fair play that we've got in this country.
RUDOLPH GIULIANI: Those people are illegally in this country. They have no right to be here. And we have a right to hold them for as long as we have to, to protect the safety of the American people.
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PATRICK O'NEILL: You can make a right at the next street. And we'll go down to the back of the prison.
ANDREW BECK GRACE, HOST:
Early last summer, we were driving around the perimeter of the Atlanta penitentiary with Patrick O'Neill, our guide, riding shotgun. O'Neill is a Catholic peace activist, a member of the Plowshares movement, a group that takes its name from a passage in the book of Isaiah, where the faithful are told to beat their swords into plowshares. He's spent the past four decades committing acts of civil disobedience in the name of disarmament, things like sabotaging ballistic missiles, throwing blood on the Pentagon and vandalizing naval bases. And when you commit crimes on federal property, you're tried in federal court.
O'NEILL: Back in 1982 was my first time actually being in the penitentiary. I had been arrested at Fort Bragg in North Carolina because at that time, Fort Bragg was training El Salvadoran death squads. So we did a protest there, a group of us. And I got a 90-day federal prison sentence.
GRACE: After O'Neill was released from that first stint, he got right back to it, taking part in another, more ambitious protest.
O'NEILL: On Easter Sunday in 1984, I joined seven other pacifists. And we broke into the Martin Marietta bomb plant in Orlando, Fla. We hammered on a missile launcher that was in the work yard. And we hammered on some components of the Pershing II missile.
GRACE: This time, O'Neill was given a three-year sentence to be served in the Atlanta penitentiary.
O'NEILL: This is where I was. I was just right up the hill here. You can turn around, and we'll go back up the other side.
GRACE: He's pointing to a narrow brick building on the prison's east side, the minimum-security block. It's a little ways down from the imposing Victorian-era building that serves as the main facility.
O'NEILL: And as soon as I get here, I find out that there are 3,000 Cubans in the penitentiary living right next door to me.
GRACE: Because they were housed in separate buildings, O'Neill didn't have much interaction with these immigration detainees. But as a minimum-security prisoner, he was assigned to landscaping duty, which had relatively little supervision. And so he got the lay of the land pretty quickly.
O'NEILL: I can go out here and walk around. I think there's about 40 acres here. And so I could walk around. So drive up here, and I'll show you. One day, I'm out here on the grounds just on the - behind the penitentiary. And I see a fire burning. And I'm like - what the hell is this? - you know, because I've never seen a fire before. And I go up to it. And sure enough, it's a bonfire. And they're burning all the Cubans' stuff in it. Like, I'm seeing half-photographs, letters, pages from Bibles, clothes and their linens and things like that. They just raked the stuff out and just put it in huge piles. Anything that could get - you know, could be lit on fire was gone.
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BRANTLEY: When Patrick O'Neill saw the smoldering piles of photos and letters and Bibles, it was late October of 1984. The story we told you about last time about Judge Shoob, about his orders releasing those like Genaro Soroa-Gonzalez who had never committed a crime in the U.S., well, by the fall of 1984, the appeals courts had struck down almost all of Judge Shoob's orders. And the release of detainees had come to a standstill. For those who came to Atlanta straight from the docks, they'd now been detained in the federal pen for over four years. They came here as refugees. But now they'd found themselves indefinitely detained with no due process inside what had long been considered one of the most dangerous prisons in the country. And their hopelessness and despair was just about to boil over.
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BRANTLEY: From NPR, this is WHITE LIES. I'm Chip Brantley.
GRACE: And I'm Andrew Beck Grace.
BRANTLEY: Patrick O'Neill, the radical Catholic peace activist serving time at the Atlanta federal penitentiary in the fall of 1984, stood looking at a still-smoking pile of personal effects, photographs, letters, handwritten lists of births and deaths from the front pages of a Bible. O'Neill knew that this stuff was all a prisoner had. And so this peculiar scene, more than anything, it seemed cruel and spiteful. He wasn't exactly sure what was going on here. But even without the full story, O'Neill felt he had to do something about it.
O'NEILL: Nobody in the guard tower saw me. So I'm stomping out the stuff - right? - and filling a bag with it.
BRANTLEY: These days, the prison is ringed by fence and razor wire. But back then, if you were in the minimum-security camp, as O'Neill was, and had a job that required you to roam the grounds as he did, believe it or not, you could actually just stroll up to the sidewalk on McDonough Boulevard and pass off that bag of possessions to someone on the outside. And so that's exactly what O'Neill planned to do.
O'NEILL: And I call up a friend of mine, who comes up and meets me here on McDonough. And that's Carla Dudeck.
GRACE: Carla Dudeck was another activist who lived in Atlanta. To make ends meet, she baked pies at a local restaurant. Rhubarb was her specialty. She'd been introduced to O'Neill by a mutual friend and had been corresponding with him in the few weeks he'd been imprisoned at the Atlanta pen. When she got the call from him, it triggered a faint memory of reading about the Cuban detainees.
CARLA DUDECK: I remember a few years before having - sitting on the bus reading the newspaper, and there was this big spread about the Cubans, and I remember just thinking, oh, that's too bad.
GRACE: Like so many others, Dudeck had heard years before about the Cuban men being detained inside the pen. But what was happening to them then seemed complicated and far off and, while sad and unfortunate, not something she could even really wrap her head around. But hearing that these men were still there nearly four years after she'd read about them in the newspaper, she just couldn't believe that they were still being detained.
DUDECK: It just - it was this whole idea that you could just keep somebody in prison forever for no reason. And it was just - nobody was paying attention.
GRACE: So when O'Neill asked her to meet him on McDonough so he could hand over the bag with the remnants of the bonfire in it, she went right over.
O'NEILL: So luckily, you know, I just always feel like the Holy Spirit's on my side. And Carla comes up and meets me, and I give her a bag full of all this singed stuff, which she brings to the Atlanta Constitution.
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BRANTLEY: Dudeck passed the stuff to a reporter at the Atlanta Constitution, as the city's morning newspaper was known then. And from there, a story began to unravel. It had all started a few weeks earlier with a bed sheet, the word libertad written across it. A group of the men being detained had unfurled the bed sheet in the yard of the prison - a small protest, a demonstration really, and a peaceful one. But it set off an escalating chain of events behind the wall. First, guards in riot gear broke up the demonstration, then a lockdown. For more than a week, the men were confined in their cells for 24 hours a day. Lawyers for the Cubans would later claim that during the lockdown, the prison stopped issuing toilet paper and shut off water to the cells. In protest of this lockdown, some of the detainees began lighting small fires in their cells.
O'NEILL: 'Cause the warden just responded by going to every cell block and sweeping out anything that was combustible. Well, of course, that meant people lost not only their clothes and their linens and things like that, but they lost all their personal property. Anything that could get - you know, could be lit on fire was gone. The warden just didn't give a damn.
BRANTLEY: Thus, the burn pile that O'Neill had found on landscaping duty that day, the charred remains of photos, letters, Bibles. For some of the men detained at the pen, these were the only personal belongings they had left in the world. A week or so later, prison officials finally released them from lockdown. What happened next, some would describe as an outburst. Later, in federal court, the U.S. government would call it a riot. Basically, what happened was that after having their property destroyed and being confined for more than two weeks in their cells, the Cubans just lost it. They took over the unit, pushing the guards out and then set some bedsheets on fire in protest. It lasted several hours and was finally broken up with tear gas and fire hoses, at which point guards came in and escorted all the men out of the unit. A Cuban detainee named Jose Hernandez-Mesa was seen to be the main organizer. And in a criminal complaint filed soon after in federal district court, the feds charged Hernandez-Mesa with inciting a riot.
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GRACE: And it's worth pausing here for a moment to consider an incredible irony that's about to happen. Remember, since the government has always contended that, legally speaking, the Mariel Cubans being detained in Atlanta are not in the country, that instead, they're floating off the coast of Key West, they've been denied due process to challenge their continued detention, not guaranteed access to counsel or the constitutional protections of our court system. But the second the federal government charges Hernandez-Mesa, it's like he becomes Cinderella - granted, for at least the duration of the trial, access to due process. He can call witnesses. He can answer the charges against him. And in particular, it means he's finally granted access to an attorney who will take on his case.
BRANTLEY: The Federal Defenders Program is a nationwide network of public defenders but for the federal system. And when the Jose Hernandez-Mesa file came into the office, the case was assigned to a new attorney, Paul Kish. And so Hernandez-Mesa became his client.
PAUL KISH: And on that day, I meet one of the most charismatic human beings I've ever met in my life, Jose Hernandez-Mesa - 5'4", bright blue eyes, built like a bantamweight boxer. He only spoke Spanish, and we always spoke through an interpreter who I used almost exclusively, Alba Males. Alba is wonderful people. Again, when an interpreter is really good, there is no - nothing between you. She's just a part of the conversation.
BRANTLEY: Alba Males - she's the interpreter you heard from last time, the one who remembered the joy in the pen on the day Genaro Soroa-Gonzalez was released. And just as she had with Soroa-Gonzalez, she would interpret for Jose Hernandez-Mesa throughout his legal proceedings.
ALBA MALES: Mesa was very charismatic, very charismatic, little guy, tiny guy, but charisma from head to toe.
BRANTLEY: Hernandez-Mesa's charisma, his energy, it stood in stark contrast to the setting for the first attorney-client meeting in the Atlanta pen.
KISH: It was just horrible, the conditions. We went out there in the middle of the day to these, like, 1910 brick buildings with no ventilation, barely any electricity. It was bad. No air conditioning. On a summer's day, it would be 110 degrees, and it was horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible place inside that giant wall. But we're, you know, going out and researching. And I - we have a wonderful investigator, Susan Miller, who goes out with us as we're interviewing witnesses.
SUSAN MILLER: So we interviewed witnesses. We documented scenes. We did background investigations.
BRANTLEY: That's the Federal Defender's office investigator, Susan Miller.
MILLER: And when I worked a case, I was in the units. I mean, we saw with our own eyes what the living conditions were and how these men were treated as animals. I mean, that is what I saw.
GRACE: Miller is retired now, lives on Alabama's Gulf Coast. And during our conversation at her dining room table, she walked us through her investigation and described her impressions of what was at stake in the Hernandez-Mesa case.
MILLER: They're clients on paper. Well, that's what the government sees, and I guess that's what they have to see. But we got to know the human. You know, we got to know the person. And you get to know what is painful to them. You know, he had hopes, and he had dreams. And I had a great sense with Jose in particular that what they were doing is they were trying to speak about their condition, about being detained without the benefit of due process. We're not supposed to do that in the United States.
GRACE: As Kish and Miller worked, they focused on a bigger story than the one told in the government court filings - the earlier demonstration with the bed sheet, the subsequent lockdown and the burn pile with all their personal items. And they came to understand just how dire, how combustible the situation was.
MILLER: And so they leave them locked down for another two weeks. And it's like, what do you expect to happen when you do this? What do you expect, that they're going to come out docile? No. No. They're angry. And you have stripped them of the last bit of home and dignity that they had. So what do you expect?
GRACE: It was this line of thinking that would become the foundation of their case, their defense of Hernandez-Mesa. You can't look at the night of the riot in isolation, they'd argue. You have to widen the aperture. You have to think about the flooded cells and the torched bed sheets in a broader context. Consider the compounding cruelties leading up to the night of November 1. And then, too you had to look at what happened next, at how the prison officials responded to this so-called riot.
KISH: They beat the shit out of those guys.
MILLER: They brought all the staff, pretty much from the whole institution. And there was a side door. And they marched the Mariels out of the side door, them up against a fence. And staff came along and proceeded to beat the living daylights out of them. And they did it in front of the AWB building, where the Americans were.
GRACE: Which meant potential witnesses, a whole cellblock full. Somebody must have seen something, right?
MILLER: What I would have done first is identify who was in that cell house. And I start getting calls from Americans saying, you need to come talk to us. We saw things. You need to come to - I mean, again, I get chills because these men's bodies are in the control of the United States Bureau of Prisons. That is so incredibly courageous and brave. What they saw was guards literally march Cubans out of the unit, out of B cell house, line them up, face first against the wall and use batons on them and kick them and punch them. That incensed them. I mean, they were livid about it. They were livid.
KISH: And we started hearing this recurring theme. There is no way they were rioting. It was total self-defense. But I am not coming to court to testify about any of this.
MILLER: They had nothing to gain out of this and absolutely everything to lose. When it came down to it at trial, they were too afraid to testify.
KISH: Until we ran into Ralph Deleo.
BRANTLEY: Ralph Deleo. Deleo's from Boston originally, alleged to be tied in with organized crime there. And he was serving time in Atlanta for a string of bank robberies and a subsequent prison escape.
KISH: Ralph is huge, a mountain of a man. And Susan was the only one, as we're interviewing, who said - looking down his rap sheet - with this one case murder, would that happen to be a hit? And he goes, oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he was a hitman. And he said, I got no problem coming in and testifying.
BRANTLEY: Once Deleo agreed to testify, other American prisoners came forward, as did a few guards and some Mariel detainees. So they had eyewitnesses willing to testify. They had the defense strategy. And as the trial loomed, Paul Kish huddled one last time with his client, Jose Hernandez-Mesa. They'd opted for a Hail Mary approach to the case, and together, they steeled their nerves before the court proceedings got underway.
KISH: And he said, you're young, but they will fear you in that, the way that a romance language is translated into English, it sounds so much more mellifluous and romantic and poetic. I just - we had a personal human connection. He believed in me. I was so young and green. But I've always been kind of a fighter. And he's a fighter. And we were in a fight together.
BRANTLEY: From the opening statements, it became clear that the prosecution wanted to have that fight on narrow ground.
KISH: The government, they're going to present a case of they're in custody one day, there's a riot, therefore guilty without any context.
BRANTLEY: But the witnesses that Kish called to the stand kept staking out more and more ground, giving testimony about prison conditions, the lockdown, the beatings, the indefinite detention, the Constitution.
KISH: And at one point, the judge had called the lawyers to the bench when one of our Americans testified. And, you know, at the bench, you're supposed to be quiet. He said it loud enough, clearly said to the jury, I don't believe a damn word that guy says, until we brought the next and the next and the next and the next and they all said the same thing.
GRACE: He even called Deborah Ebel as an expert witness.
DEBORAH EBEL: They were in an amazingly scary federal penitentiary that was the most maximum secure penitentiary in the whole federal system.
GRACE: Deborah Ebel, the legal aid lawyer who had represented Genaro Soroa-Gonzales who, by this point, had spent years representing the men detained at the Atlanta pen and arguably knew more than anyone about the circumstances of their confinement.
KISH: It was very effective, I think, in setting the background. The government tried to cross-examine her, which was a foolish move because she knew the issue better than they did. Plus, every time they tried to go somewhere, her point was, yeah, but the United States Constitution is not providing any rights to these human beings. And according to you, Mr. Prosecutor, they'd have no rights and will never have any rights for the rest of their natural lives.
GRACE: Then it was time for their star witness, Ralph Deleo.
KISH: To bring all the prisoners into - it's a bit of work. You got to do a lot of paperwork. And so they are in a little holding pen, and you're in the middle of trial. So you're not really - can't see what's going on. And so we call Ralph Deleo to the witness stand. The door opens. The marshals bring him out. Ralph has gussied himself up with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. It's so professorial. It's almost like he's got patches on his elbows.
EBEL: Ralph almost had the jury eating from his hand. I can't do this without almost play-acting it. But on direct examination, Ralph took his glasses off and pointed at the jury with them.
GRACE: I just want to say, since this is radio, what you're doing right now is the little classic, like, "Law And Order" or "Matlock" lawyer interrogating. Yeah.
EBEL: Yes. I mean, Ralph was just really - he's a unique character.
KISH: But he told the truth, which is when the Cubans came out when ordered to do so, they were beaten to a pulp.
GRACE: As the trial wound down, Kish was still casting about for his closing argument, something that would appeal to the jury's basic sense of fairness, something that would allow them to put the charges against Jose Hernandez-Mesa in a broader moral context.
KISH: I remember this like it was yesterday. So there was a downtown YMCA I used to work out at, and I would go for a run out of there. So I was running in the dark, and I just had this - you know how when you work out, sometimes if you deprive your brain of oxygen, only one or two ideas can stay in your head? And then a couple of steps later, I had the thing that became the theme of our argument, which is, why are we blaming them? - because the United States government put all this together. So I came up with the thing of, you know, if you have a can of gas and you got a match and you put the match into the gas can and it explodes, who do you blame - the match?
GRACE: Who do you blame - the people who created the situation or the people who reacted because of it? After Kish delivered the closing argument, the jury took less than one hour to decide that they were not going to blame Jose Hernandez-Mesa.
KISH: The jury comes back in, like, no time flat, you know, clearly repudiating the U.S. government's position.
EBEL: I love the word acquittal. The jury saw what we saw, and they said to Jose, you're right. We get this. This isn't right. What we're doing, what our government is doing in our name is not right.
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BRANTLEY: A reporter covering the trial wrote that when the verdict was read, Hernandez-Mesa, quote, "rested his head face down on his folded arms on the defense table and sobbed quietly."
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BRANTLEY: When the reporter talked to the foreman of the jury, an insurance executive who lived in the suburbs northeast of Atlanta, he said he was, quote, "ashamed of the way the U.S. government was treating the Cuban detainees," end quote. Another juror said he found the testimony of the American prisoners more credible than that of the prison officials and guards. A fourth juror told the reporter that she thought it was, quote, "unfair" that the Cubans had no voice, no due process.
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GRACE: The strange thing about this acquittal was that the defendant didn't leave the courtroom a free man because even though the federal government had treated Jose Hernandez-Mesa like he was on U.S. soil when it charged him with inciting a riot, after the acquittal, the government went back to treating him like a legal fiction, like his body wasn't here at all, like he was out at sea, asking to come in. And because they decided that he was excludable, he had no right to have rights in this country. The clock struck midnight, and his time as Cinderella afforded representing ocean and due process had ended. So he would remain in detention.
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GRACE: Not long after the trial, Paul Kish and Susan Miller and the interpreter Alba Males went to visit Jose Hernandez-Mesa one last time.
KISH: They brought him in. He was trussed up almost like in an insane asylum. He had a straitjacket on. He was chained, manacled. And we had to work really hard to convince them, well, at least, you know, chain him to the chair so we can talk together.
GRACE: They talked a guard into releasing one of his arms so that he could smoke a cigarette, and then they just sat and talked. One of them took a photograph of Mesa. In it, you see him sitting in front of a window in a starched prison uniform. The photo has captured him in profile. He's pointing up in the air as if in the middle of a story, a cigarette in his right hand. His left hand is chained to the manacles around his waist. This photo, incidentally, is in Paul Kish's office to this very day.
MALES: We kept in touch after, you know, for a while. But then, as I say, I got married, and life completely changed.
GRACE: For a while, Alba Males exchanged letters with Hernandez-Mesa. And when we visited her, she found the letters and read the last one he'd sent her.
MALES: (Reading) My sister, Alba, God willing, when you receive this letter, you are fine, surrounded by the divine mantle of happiness as well as your family. I am fine. I've made up my mind that this cell is my home because they are not going to upset my nervous condition. I do a lot of exercise every day. I sleep a lot. I eat. And I'm not working, so you know how it is. Well, Alba, I'm so grateful to you and Paul and Susan for how good you all have been to me. I have no way to repay you. Believe it from the bottom of my heart that I love you all very much. Well, my sister, this is it for now from your brother who loves you. Give Paul and Susan my greetings. That's it. Answer me please. Don't send this letter to the mailbox of forgetfulness. Mesa.
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MANUEL GUERRERO: Hey, guys.
GRACE: Hey. How are you?
GUERRERO: Well, I was actually taking a nap. Mairim had to call me that it was 5.
GRACE: Well, I'm glad you got a nap. How are things in Cuba?
MAIRIM ROSA SANCHEZ: Hey, guys. So sorry.
GRACE: Hey.
BRANTLEY: Hey, Mairim. How are you?
SANCHEZ: Hi. Hi. Fine, thanks.
BRANTLEY: So we'd like to introduce you to two people who've been working with us on this story. This is Manuel.
GUERRERO: I am Manuel Guerrero, and I am the researcher, historian and interpreter.
BRANTLEY: And this is Mairim.
SANCHEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
BRANTLEY: Manuel and Mairim both live in Havana. And for more than a year now, we've been doing these WhatsApp calls with them. Whenever our search for the men on the roof would turn up a name, we'd send that name to Manuel and Mairim. That's what we did with Jose Hernandez-Mesa.
GRACE: What's the story? Have you been able to find anything about Mesa?
GUERRERO: The thing is, this is a very common last name. This is a very common first name. So essentially, we are looking for a needle in a haystack.
BRANTLEY: After his trial was over, Mesa was transferred from Atlanta to the federal prison in Talladega, Ala., where he spent more years in immigration detention. The last trace we found of him in the files in the basement of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society was a notice of his deportation from Talladega. He was deported to Cuba on September 9, 1991, just over a week after the Talladega prison uprising ended. He had been one of the 116 men let out of their cells when the takeover began. He very well could have been one of those men on the roof.
GUERRERO: The interesting thing about Mesita is the fact that he remains so elusive. Once again...
SANCHEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
GUERRERO: First of all, he does not appear alive. He does not appear active in the system, but he doesn't appear as dead also.
GRACE: And so you feel pretty...
GUERRERO: So (inaudible)...
GRACE: You feel pretty confident about death records in Cuba, that you would be able to find him if he was deceased?
GUERRERO: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are.
BRANTLEY: When we met with Paul Kish, we scanned the photo he has of Mesa from the mid-'80s and sent it to Mairim and Manuel to help them with their search.
GUERRERO: So from the beginning, since Mesita was rather an elusive figure and we were unable to find him directly, so we showed them the picture. And in most cases the answer was the same. Yes, we met him. Yes, we met him. The first person we asked mentioned that he was from Matanzas. But as we continued to ask, people began to locate him in Las Villas, which is one of the central provinces of Cuba. With this in mind, we narrowed the search to Las Villas, but we haven't been successful.
BRANTLEY: So what do you think happened to him?
GUERRERO: The possibility that we have been considering is the fact that he left the country illegally. I mean, he could be in the United States. It's only that he left Cuba illegally, so there are no records of his leaving the country.
GRACE: Right. And that's so common, these days especially, that I guess that's a very realistic possibility, I guess.
GUERRERO: I think so. Yeah. You know, in his particular case - and I'm talking from my hunches here - in his particular case, I don't think he left the country. I think that he left his home province and is living somewhere else in Cuba. I think this guy does not want to be found. And he's actually - I mean, if not, actually, he's quite metaphorically living under a rock.
BRANTLEY: It's a big island.
GUERRERO: It's a big island, but it's not that big anywhere.
GRACE: It's a big world. It's really hard to find somebody...
GUERRERO: Yeah.
GRACE: ...Especially somebody who doesn't want to be found, you know? Well, we really appreciate your time.
BRANTLEY: Yes. Thank you.
GRACE: Thank you so much.
GUERRERO: OK, guys. Thank you. Bye.
GRACE: OK, ciao.
BRANTLEY: See you guys.
GRACE: Bye.
BRANTLEY: Bye.
Mairim and Manuel tracked down all the Jose Hernandez-Mesas in Cuba, and we tried every way we know how to find them in the U.S. But after 1991, there's just no trace of him. It really was as if the earth had swallowed him.
O'NEILL: ...If you want to just do that. There's no no-parking signs. I mean, maybe there's a place we could just park on the street.
BRANTLEY: Yeah. Let me get - I'm going to turn around.
O'NEILL: Yeah.
GRACE: Patrick O'Neill, the peace advocate who helped raise awareness of the plight of the Cubans while he was incarcerated at the Atlanta Federal Pen, had one more place he wanted to take us during our tour of the prison last summer.
O'NEILL: It's really questionable how many inmates are even here. You know, I think they've diminished the population significantly. But I definitely had a sense that there's nobody up in the guard towers anymore.
GRACE: The prison is more than a hundred and twenty years old now, and it's still open, at least for the time being. Like dozens of times throughout its history, it's recently come under intense scrutiny for overcrowding and violence. It's not used to house immigration detainees anymore, and as a result of a congressional investigation, today it's only about half-full.
BRANTLEY: So how many federal prisons have you been at?
O'NEILL: Six or seven. Yeah.
GRACE: We parked on the west side of the prison, and then walked toward the railroad tracks that run behind the facility.
BRANTLEY: So is that work - will you continue that work?
O'NEILL: You know...
BRANTLEY: Sorry, I shouldn't ask you that.
O'NEILL: Well, no, it's - you know, the thing is it's not that. It's just that you kind of move with the flow of these things. Like, I turned 65 in solitary confinement last year (laughter).
BRANTLEY: Yeah.
O'NEILL: I'm getting a little older...
BRANTLEY: Yeah.
O'NEILL: ...You know? I don't know what I'm going to do. I mean, I hope I have the faith to keep resisting, you know?
BRANTLEY: How far down is the cemetery from here?
O'NEILL: About 15-minute walk.
BRANTLEY: Yeah.
O'NEILL: You're going to be better off...
BRANTLEY: Patrick recently walked these same tracks with his daughter. He wanted to show her the prison cemetery. When Patrick took the burned remains of the Cubans' personal effects and handed them off to Carla Dudeck, he helped raise awareness of the plight of the detainees, but he also drew the ire of the warden, who was quick to punish him. Instead of free-ranging walks around the prison raking leaves, he was now heading up the crew tasked with digging graves.
O'NEILL: This is it. That's the graveyard. Now, we got...
BRANTLEY: The graveyard sits on a rolling hill bordered by a thicket of oak and pecan trees. The tombstones are simple flat markers recessed in the ground with only the name of the year of birth and the year of death.
O'NEILL: You'll see graves down at the bottom of this hill here that are from the early 1900s. This is the - these are the first graves here. This is a 1902 death.
BRANTLEY: Wow.
GRACE: So that's the year the prison opened. They're already burying people.
O'NEILL: 1902 death. So we go up here. You work your way up.
BRANTLEY: As you work your way up the hill, you go forward in time.
O'NEILL: A lot of these are Depression-era graves, which mean people probably - probably just their families were too poor to claim the body.
BRANTLEY: The only people who wind up buried in a prison cemetery are those who have no one to claim them. And so despite the many deaths that have happened here in over a century since the prison has been in operation, there are only a couple of hundred graves here.
O'NEILL: So that's '84. So that's right before I got here - '85, '85. So these are the Cubans right here. Now, this is a lot of Cubans now. Look at the numbers here.
GRACE: Yeah.
O'NEILL: This is a lot of people, like, just in that one year. Let's see how many Cubans end up in here. OK. Here's '84. Here's '87.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRACE: According to a document compiled by the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, 32 Cuban men died in the Atlanta Federal Pen between 1980 and 1987. There were homicides, heart attacks, the vague natural causes, but nearly a third of them died by suicide.
O'NEILL: So these were the guys I was burying right here. This whole row here, I probably was at the graveside service for everybody here. I mean, I think we did a nice job, as best we could, under the circumstances of honoring the dead, burying the dead, like the corporal work of mercy. I mean, I think it was meaningful. I think we felt sincere pain for the loss of this guy's life, especially if it was a suicide. And, you know, there were no families that ever came to these things. There was never a time when any of the deaths of these men was announced publicly. Like, the prison did not put out a press release saying Reyes Gonzalez Aurelio, 32 years old, died on Monday at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Like, there's no account of it. So these people all die anonymously. Like, nobody knows their names except you guys, right? I mean, you're here. You're seeing it. This is proof. But - well, I mean, look at the whole place, and look at the components of it, right? We're in a graveyard. All these men died here. This is not the place you want to die.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GRACE: We sit around for a while longer taking it all in, and then, when we were just about to leave, Patrick asked if he could say a small prayer.
O'NEILL: So, God, we come to this place of despair - all of these children of yours who died very young and having suffered terribly, then we know these are your children, Lord. And we just ask God to help us change our ways, to abolish prisons and this maltreatment of the vulnerable in our society. We make these prayers in the name of a loving God, the Prince of Peace, the Lord of Lords and the author of Life. Amen.
GRACE: If you were one of the Cuban men detained in Atlanta, the misery wasn't just the terrible conditions. It was the specter that you might be there forever, that you could be held indefinitely without any explanation, that it was arbitrary, that there might not even be any explanation, that Rudolph Giuliani, the associate attorney general at the time, had told "60 Minutes" this.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "60 MINUTES")
GIULIANI: These people are illegally in this country. They can, by law, be confined by the attorney general indeterminately.
GRACE: And the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, just one step below the Supreme Court of the United States, had gone even further when they told attorneys for the men detained at the pen, quote, "the federal government can hold these people in prison until they die." And for the men in the Atlanta penitentiary, this wasn't hypothetical. It meant that one day you might wind up in the prison graveyard, down in that thicket of oaks off the railroad tracks.
BRANTLEY: But then on December 14, 1984, something completely unexpected happened.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: For the first time in the Reagan administration, the United States and Cuba have reached an agreement. Undesirables who came here in the big Cuban boatlift four years ago will be sent back. In return...
BRANTLEY: Throughout 1984, the U.S. State Department and representatives of the Cuban government had been meeting in secret to hammer out an agreement. The agreement was about a list, a list of names, the names of 2,746 Cubans the U.S. wanted to send back. The government refused to reveal who was on the list. It was a secret list made in secret, kept in secret. And when asked about this list, they would often say that the men on the list were the dregs, the criminals, the worst of the worst. Trust us, they said. And for nearly 40 years now, people have been trying to get access to this list. There have been public records requests. There have been lawsuits. A parade of attorneys and advocates and journalists have sought it out. But no one has gotten their hands on the list.
GRACE: We got a package. A source who said they had something they believed was the list sent it to us. And now it is sitting unopened on the table in front of us.
BRANTLEY: That's next time on WHITE LIES.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIOHEAD SONG, "THE NATIONAL ANTHEM")
GRACE: If you want to hear our next episode now before everyone else, sign up for Embedded Plus at plus.npr.org/embedded, or find the Embedded channel on Apple. It's a great way to support our work, and you'll get to listen to the entire season sponsor-free. That's plus.npr.org/embedded.
BRANTLEY: WHITE LIES is reported, written and produced by us and Connor Towne O'Neill. This episode also featured reporting and production help from Mairim Rosa Sanchez and Manuel Guerrero. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer. Annie Iezzi is our associate producer. Robert Little edits the show with help from Bruce Auster, Keith Woods, Christopher Turpin and Kamala Kelkar. Our incredible score is composed and performed by Jeff T. Byrd.
GRACE: Emily Bogle is senior visual editor. Barbara van Woerkem is our fact-checker. The audio engineer for this episode is Maggie Luthar. Special thanks to Radiohead for the use of their song "The National Anthem," courtesy of XL Recordings and Warner Chappell Music. Archival tape in this episode comes from the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, CBS and NBC. Special thanks to Sally Sandidge, Susan Garrett, Comer Yates, David Payne, Ann Woolner, Fred Grimm, Stephanie Kearns, Jamie Green, Jessica Johnson, Hannah Berkeley Cohen, Giselle Garcia Castro, Serena McCracken and Jennie Oldfield.
BRANTLEY: We are grateful for the work of Micah Ratner and NPR's legal team and Tony Cavin, NPR's Standards and Practices editor. Our project manager is Margaret Price. Irene Noguchi is the executive producer of NPR's Enterprise Storytelling Unit. And Anya Grundmann is NPR's senior vice president for programming and audience development.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE NATIONAL ANTHEM")
RADIOHEAD: (Singing) Everyone, everyone is so near. Everyone has got the fear. It's holding on. It's holding on.
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