FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — A record of 19 years inside a Cuban women’s prison is more than simply a personal autobiography or account of triumph over brutality, according to University of Arkansas researcher Lisa M. Corrigan.

In Diary of a Survivor, political prisoner Ana Rodríguez offers both a practical tool to teach women how to survive in prison and an indictment of a government that claimed to be protecting women. Corrigan discussed her analysis of the diary at the recent annual conference of the National Communication Association in a presentation titled “Recording the Life and Activism of a Cuban Counterrevolutionary: Rhetorical Strategies in the Testimonio of Ana Rodríguez.”

Rodríguez’s diary is a testimonio, a form of writing popular in Latin America as a challenge to repressive governments. Testimonios, Corrigan said, both record the stories of people who would be eliminated from officially sanctioned history while documenting the mass repression common to violent regime changes.

“Testimonio has often been confused with documentary because so much of the literature of the genre has been centered upon human rights abuses and eyewitness accounts of excessive state violence,” Corrigan said, “but this often overlooks the way that testimonio is first and foremost literature.”

Diary of a Survivor was written after Rodríguez left Cuba as part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, and she uses the lens of her own life to describe the Cuban revolution and its aftermath. As a young woman, Rodríguez was part of the revolution to overthrow the corrupt dictatorship of Fulginio Baptista.

Soon after Castro gained control of the government, seven secret police came to her mother’s home to arrest her for counterrevolutionary activities. She chooses to begin her life story with this scene and with her realization that the police are “cowardly little men.” As they search her room she sprawls on the bed telling them how to hold their guns and suggesting other spots to search.

“From the beginning of the narrative, Rodríguez exerts her control over the text by showcasing her control over the agents of the state,” Corrigan said. “The reader is at once convinced that this young girl has the upper hand despite the guns constraining her movement. She exposes the corruption of the regime for those who cannot see its abuses, and at the very beginning of the text subtly becomes a visionary who can reveal the soft underbelly of the revolution.”

She spent the next 19 years in Cuban prisons among political prisoners and criminals. Diary of a Survivor is both a practical tool that shows women how to survive in prison and an indictment of the Castro regime. Under Castro, Corrigan explained, a masculine ideal was promoted, while women were idealized as mother figures whose virtue must be protected. Prostitutes were rounded up and sent to prison with violent criminals. In prison, rape and beatings were common, and pregnancy could be a death sentence due to lack of medical care.

In one prison Rodríguez leads a group of women in resisting the guards’ brutality, and her writing about the incident contrasts her women-led movement with the reality of Castro’s “new revolutionary man.” In the testimonio she both presents Castro’s agents as bullies who inflict arbitrary violence and “makes the women resisting the prison regime visible when the regime itself clearly wants them to be disappeared and forgotten.”

Throughout the diary, Rodríguez resists the patriarchy of Castro’s revolution at an individual level and collectively with her fellow prisoners. At the same time, she resists on the theoretical level by exposing the reality behind the paternalistic and nationalistic rhetoric of the state and prison authorities.

“Diary of a Survivor stands as an important contribution to both prison literature as well as a piece of guerilla pedagogy that provides ample strategies for withstanding state-sanctioned violence as well as the surveillance and brutality of the prison regime,” Corrigan said.

Corrigan is an assistant professor of communication in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas.