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{From: The Boston Globe, November 16, 1992, by Julie Hatfield}
Yoga Saved Cuban's Life
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Most people who practice flexibility, strength and suppleness
probably won't ever need to use it the way Dr. Yamil Kouri did
when he was a political prisoner in Cuba for 15 years.
But Kouri, 54, of Harvard University's Institute for
International Development, knows intimately both yoga and pain,
so much of the latter that it has taken him more than a decade to
begin to talk about what happened to him when he was imprisoned
in his native country for conspiring against the Castro regime.
For the first time since he was released 13 years ago, Kouri, a
research coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean at the
Institute, will speak to the public about his experience,
including how the yoga he practiced helped him and his fellow
prisoners survive. His talk Wednesday at Harvard's JFK School of
Government is titled "Yoga in difficult Times." The label is a
gross understatement of the experiences that led him on a new
path of study in his field.
Now, in addition to traveling regularly to Haiti, Argentina,
Honduras, Panama and other Latin American countries to develop
their health programs, Kouri is studying 'siddis', or powers,
that come from yoga, and is also exploring the field of hypnosis.
Born in Cuba, Kouri was condemned to death in 1965 for conspiring
to topple the Castro regime. Thanks to efforts of his wife, who
requested that the Roman Catholic Church and pope become
involved, and the Mexican embassy, the only embassy in Cuba at
that time that granted political asylum, his sentence was changed
to life imprisonment. After six years in protection at the
Mexican embassy, Kouri made a deal with Cuban authorities that
allowed his mother-in-law to leave the country if he would
surrender himself to solitary confinement. He was thrown into a
prison cell 2 feet wide by 2 feet long, with a hole in the floor
and no windows.
"The cell was so devoid of light that the cockroaches were white;
they had lost their pigment," he said. Liquids and a spoonful of
white spaghetti were passed to him daily; otherwise the only
human sounds he could hear were those of prisoners committing
suicide nearby. He lost almost 90 pounds and his beard grew
long. For 2� years, Kouri also was without books and clothes.
Kouri couldn't lie down, and it came to him to adopt the lotus
position of yoga when he was tired. He has learned these
movements from an Indian roommate at Harvard, where he received
his undergraduate degree.
"They all came back to me, but this time, they represented more
than just exercise," he said. "I was able to breathe deeply and
detach myself, and in a way, visit my family, by means of the
yoga." (When he entered prison, he left behind his wife and four
children, the youngest of whom was just a few months old.)
In yoga there is a way a person can temporarily leave the world
around him by looking inward, and while the eyes are still open,
the mind is elsewhere, usually in deep concentration or
meditation. Open eyes that are looking at the so-called "third
eye" in the center of the forehead are devoid of pain and
suffering, no matter how much the person who is looking inward
has endured. Thereafter, Kouri, who was brought up a Roman
Catholic, said he was able to retain his mental health by "going
inside."
"I did not suffer, and I could have stayed there my whole life,"
he said.
After his solitary confinement he was taken to a concentration
came called Taco Taco in Cuba and told that he would be acting as
the only physician for 10,000 prisoners, many of whom were sick
and malnourished.
"There were no medical instruments, so the prisoners made some,
and we sterilized them in boiling water," Kouri said. "There was
no aspirin even, and no anesthesia, and I was doing open-heart
surgery on patients who had been stabbed, and abdominal surgery
in some cases, with the patient awake.
One day, not being able to help a patient in great pain, I
induced a hypnotic state in him. It alleviated his pain, and I
began to use hypnosis on other patients. It was a power that
came to me. I found I could do it instantly, almost as soon as a
patient walked in to see me. I had not had the capability to
hypnotize before I went into prison, and I felt myself losing it
as I finally headed toward Miami much later. I could not do it
now.
One of the reasons for Kouri's talk this week is that he has
begun to miss the powers he had while in prison. "It felt like I
came into contact with my soul," he said, explaining that through
yoga he had lost all fear for his physical body.
The prison experience also served as a major influence in
transforming his career toward public service; in addition to his
medical degree, Kouri subsequently earned both a master's and a
PhD degree in public health from Harvard.
There were other powers that came to Kouri in prison. One time,
he began to hypnotize a man who had been food-poisoned. "After a
while, I saw some green liquid coming out of his mouth, and I
realized that it was bile, from his intestine. I could hardly
believe it. On the outside, the only way to get bile out of a
person's intestine is to insert a needle directly into it. It
doesn't come out of the patient's mouth, ever. I couldn't do
today what I did for this man; I wouldn't have the power."
Prisoners were given rats to eat, but, Kouri said, "I transformed
terrible food to the best, by hypnosis."
Kouri also became a reluctant and untrained oral surgeon,
extracting molars while his patients were under his hypnosis.
Thanks to the efforts of a priest at his son's school in Puerto
Rico in 1979, and to the Carter administration's efforts in the
Mariel boatlift of prisoners from Cuba to Miami in 1980, Kouri
was released in exchange for a Cuban officer who had been freed
in Angola, and sent to Florida with 125,000 exiles from his
country. "I owe my freedom to Jimmy Carter," Kouri said, adding
that for nearly a year after he left, each night he still felt he
was in prison.
"My soul was attached to everything that happened there, and I
couldn't let go," he said. Only now has he begun to talk about
the experience in detail. One time was in a yoga class at
Harvard last spring, when the teacher asked him to describe what
yoga had done for him. "I became a doctor when I was in prison.
I became a stronger person."
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