At Midnight

In this age of almost daily atrocity, it is easy to become inured to arbitrary death. Reading At Midnight is a profound antidote to such complacency. Thanks to Arzuaga, I will go to my own grave much more keenly aware of the value, yet vulnerability, of every human life.

—William A. Douglass

Javier Arzuaga was a young Basque priest whose parish included La Cabaña, the fortress where the accomplices of the deposed dictator who had not fled after the Cuban Revolution were held. It was his fate to be at the executions carried out between February and May of 1959. And he did not witness them as a bystander, but as the consoler of and attendant to the condemned. “It is not easy to talk to a man with a death sentence,” Javier said—and he had to speak with fifty-five.