''"In 1961 he returned to the Isle of Pines. His crime was “counter-revolution”. He was said to have tried to assassinate Mr Castro, but he denied that he had ever been enlisted. The falling-out was personal and ideological. His face had now been airbrushed out of the photographs in which he smiled as Fidel's friend.''

''Prison was much less comfortable than before. That spring the Isle of Pines had been sown with dynamite, linked up to the wiring system in the prison, so that any American attempt to rescue the prisoners would blow them to smithereens. It was, Mr Chanes de Armas remembered, “like sleeping on a powder keg”. Prisoners—in 1961, around 6,000 of them—were meant to submit to communist “re-education”; he became the leader of those who resisted. He refused to wear the blue uniform of a common criminal, instead going naked or in underpants. He took part in forced labour as slowly as he could, digging ditches or chopping up blocks of marble in the fierce, dripping Cuban heat. For weeks at a time he was put in tapiadas, steel isolation cells, and gavetas, “drawers”, so narrow that he could only stand. He and his followers were called plantados, planted squarely—though sparsely—as trees across Mr Castro's path.''

''He was in prison for one day short of 30 years."''