Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
man to be shot. He was talking about me. The campaign organized by the Communists had reached such vast proportions that it made me begin to fear very seriously for my life. By now, faced with what I was going through, I had discarded my assumption that the worst that could happen to me was being fired from my job. It might actually be the firing squad instead.
The next morning very early, I was taken to my last interrogation. It almost had the flavor of a farewell.
“We know that you have connections to elements that are conspiring against the State, that you are friendly with some of them. If you cooperate with us, we can give you your freedom and send you back to your job.”
“I don’t know any of those people. I don’t have any contact with conspirators.”
“This is the last chance you have to get yourself out of this.”
“I don’t know anything. You people can’t send me to jail, you can’t find me guilty, because I haven’t done anything. There’s no proof against me. You have no evidence to show.”
“Our conviction is enough for us. We know that you are a potential enemy of the Revolution. Look!” And he tossed several afternoon newspapers at me. In big letters on the front pages was written “FIRING SQUAD FOR TERRORISTS.”
“They want an example made of you, so ...” He left the threat hanging in the air.
That night Carlos Alberto, Richard, and I took a can opener and began to make a hole in the wall behind the toilet. We were going to try to escape. It wasn’t easy; we had to chip off the stucco that covered the wall before we could even start taking out the cement blocks.
The day after my arrest, my sister went to the police station nearest our house to try to find out what had happened to me. They told her they didn’t know anything about me. She went to Fifth Avenue and Calle 14, where I was being held at the time, and there too they told her they didn’t have me in custody. When the newspaper stories about me and the others came out, the vigilance committees1 in my neighborhood, led by several plainclothes agents from the Political Police, organized a march in the street. They stoned the doors and windows of my house. The inflamed mob cried, “Firing squad! Shoot them!” My mother was terrified. She collapsed to the floor senseless. My sister ran out of the house crying for a doctor.
Later, she tried once more to find out where I was, and that time they did not deny that I was at the headquarters of the Political Police. They ordered her to sit down. After a while, they sent her into an office and began to interrogate her, accusing her too of being a counterrevolutionary. Their hatred for my whole family was such that they not only forced her to undergo the interrogation, and the accusations they flung at her, but also photographed her, as they had me, with a sign reading “COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY.” They would not allow her to see me.
Carlos Alberto, Richard, and I took turns trying to make our hole in the wall. We knew we were risking reprisals, but we felt we had to try to escape. We didn’t manage to finish the job, however; they took us away before we could. We never knew whether it was a coincidence or whether one of the many prisoners held there was an informer or an agent of the Political Police.
In the interior patio, a car was waiting. There was another prisoner already in it — Zoila, the same woman I had seen when they had taken our photographs. They warned us not to speak.
Those were the first days of 1961. All along the shore in Havana, there were cannons pointed toward the north. The United States had broken off relations with Cuba; and the government was concerned about the threat of an invasion. The wind raised great waves that leaped over the wall of the Malecón, the seawall that runs along the coast of Havana. The car sped down the shore road and went through the tunnel across the bay, and we entered the fortress of La Cabaña. In front of the high fence, its gate opening onto the medieval-looking main entrance of the prison-fortress, they ordered us out of the car. They turned some papers over to the soldier posted at the gate, and the car went on toward the women’s prison, the other passenger’s destination.
2
LA CABAÑA
The fortress of La Cabana was built by the Spaniards two hundred years ago to protect the entrance to the port of Havana. When the English took the port in 1762, the first thing they did was secure this fortress. Because of its location, it was said, “Whoever holds La Cabaña holds the key to the city.” Since the triumph of the Revolution, it had been converted into a political prison, and in its deep moats, now dry if they had ever been filled with water, the executions by firing squad were carried out.
La Cabaña sat atop a hill on the opposite side of the bay from Havana. It was very isolated. Great parade grounds, firing ranges, and open land surrounded it. The artillery school was located there.
They opened a small metal door and ordered me inside. Now at the entrance to the fortress, I could see the prison yard in front of the galeras, large rooms which had served the many purposes of a colonial fortress-barracks, storerooms, ammunition magazines, and so on — and which now were barred and used as large cells for the prisoners held there. There were hundreds of prisoners looking out curiously at us, the new arrivals. I went first into a small apartment, where they registered me and gave me a card, and then to the storehouse. There, they stripped off the clothing I wore, a new suit, and gave me the prison uniform, which had a large black P stenciled on the back. They promised to give the suit to my family the first time they came to visit me, but they never did. The head of the storeroom had been a member of Castro’s guerrillas; he was now in prison for the crime of armed robbery. These “delinquents,” common criminals, lived in a galera which opened off the main gate outside the central patio, intentionally kept separate from the political prisoners. They still wore the olive-green uniform, and this one wore his hair in a ponytail in imitation of Raúl Castro. He hated political prisoners, and never missed an opportunity to show it.
I left the storeroom and found myself suddenly in the prison yard, in the midst of that multitude of prisoners. I didn’t know a soul. They had assigned me to galera 12, so I went to look for it.
At the door, a young prisoner stood watching me. Behind his sunglasses, his bright eyes sparkled with intelligence and bottled-up energy. He smiled affably and extended his hand. He was Pedro Luis Boitel, a leader of the Student Movement at the University. He had fought against Batista in the underground and later had managed to flee to Venezuela, but he had returned when the dictator fell. He had recognized me from the photographs that had appeared in the newspapers. He was the first person I met there, and we became great friends, as close as brothers. Boitel lived toward the center of the gallery, on a high bunk. All the beds were taken. There were too many prisoners.
The galeras were vaulted galleries — that is, shaped like rural mailboxes, or tunnels, open at both ends. One end of all of them faced the moat that circumscribed the fortress. At that outward-facing end of the galeras, they were secured by not one but two iron gratings of thick bars. The walls were about three feet thick, so the gratings, which were on the exterior and interior faces of the walls, wound up spaced about a yard apart. There were two masonry observation posts, called garitas, at the top of the wall around the prison yard from which guards with machine guns always kept the prison yard, the prisoners, and the iron bars of the cells under surveillance.
That afternoon some of the prisoners who had been with me at Political Police Headquarters arrived — Carlos Alberto Montaner, Alfredo Carrión, Nestor Piñango, and some others. They all knew Boitel from the University, and they were also sent to our gallery.
The first night we had to sleep on the floor between the beds and in the passages between the rows. Since one end of all the cells opened to the north, the cold wind blew fiercely through the barred window arches. There were not enough blankets to go around, and we almost froze. The next day we got word out to our families that they would be permitted to visit us.
Two men, cousins, Ulises and Julio Antonio Yebra, had been arrested the same morning I had. They had appeared in the newspaper photographs too. Julio