Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
much danger, so many hard times and so much anguish! Surely that shared past couldn’t simply be forgotten, just like that.
The next night, at Castro’s express order, Humberto Sorí Marín was shot by firing squad.
In galeras 11, 12, and 14 of La Cabaña were collected the most dissimilar types — officers in Batisa’s army and revolutionaries who had defeated them were all thrown in there together. Many of the former Castro supporters were, like Sorí Marín, to die under the same laws they had cited in executing their enemies. David Salvador was there, the leader of the 26th of July Movement and former secretary-general of the Federation of Cuban Workers. He was one of the most radical and fervent young Communists. In fact, it was he who grabbed the microphone away from the former president of Costa Rica, José Figueres, while Figueres was speaking at a meeting once. It seems that Figueres declared that if an armed conflict arose between the United States and the Soviet Union, Latin America would take the side of the Americans. Salvador was incensed by Figueres’s words; Fidel Castro, who was sitting on the dais too, smiled in sympathy with Salvador. Nevertheless a few months later David Salvador was sentenced to thirty years in prison as a counterrevolutionary.
Another of the prisoners in those galeras was Guillermo Díaz Lanz. He was the brother of the first commander of the Revolutionary Air Force. His brother had escaped to the United States within a few months of the Revolution’s takeover and was combating Castro from there. It was literally a crime for Guillermo to have such a brother. He was found guilty of being the brother of the “traitor” Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz. And that was all he was found guilty of.
The machinery of the Revolution was not to be halted, and like Saturn it devoured its own children. But within the prison population, there was a moving sense of camaraderie. There might have been isolated incidents of anger and resentment when a revolutionary arrived who had been a man’s arresting officer or the prosecuting attorney against a prisoner held there now under sentence of death, but those incidents happened very rarely. There were bankers, students, ex-soldiers from both sides in the recent civil war, workers, campesinos. But they shared a single identity, or a principle of identity, more powerful than old differences: Everyone bore the black P stenciled on the back of his uniform, and the same bayonets prodded and wounded them all, and the same bullets awaited them, the same firing squad.
The men who fought alongside Castro to establish democracy had been tricked; some fled the country, others took up arms again, or formed conspiracies against him. The army officers, police agents, and officials of the deposed regime who had been charged with crimes — unproven in many instances — had already been shot. But Castro had found a new enemy — the enemy within — and no one was safe from this threat of “instant justice.”
It was during those months that a group of women dressed in black would come into the galeras, peering intently, scrutinizing every face. All it took was for one of those women to lift a finger and point: “That one! That’s the one who killed my son!” The man stood accused. That testimony, without any other corroboration, was enough. The prisoner was shot. This situation lent itself, obviously, to personal vendetta; it didn’t necessarily require any real criminal action. The execution was often carried out without any trial, in fact.
The men who had been in La Cabaña since the beginning of 1959 say that whenever one of those delegations of women appeared at the prison gate some prisoners would hide under the beds. One case was notorious. A mother pointed out the supposed murderer of her son, and the man was executed within a few hours. But the next day her son, safe and sound, arrived from Venezuela, where he had fled without his mother’s knowledge. He showed up at the prison, horrified that an innocent man had been killed.
5
THE YEAR OF THE FIRING SQUAD
Early in 1959, on January 21, to be exact, Castro gave a speech in front of the Presidential Palace in which he declared, “There will not be more than about four hundred henchmen and conspirators against the Revolution that we will execute.” But many more than that had already fallen before the firing squads in those days of barbarity and death.
On January 12, on a firing range located in a small valley called San Juan, at the end of the island in the province of Oriente, hundreds of soldiers from the defeated army of Batista had been lined up in a trench knee-deep and more than fifty yards long. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were machine-gunned there where they stood. Then with bulldozers the trenches were turned into mass graves. There had been no trial of any kind for those men. Many of them were hardly more than boys, who had joined the army because money and food were scarce at home. The mass execution was ordered by Raúl Castro and attended by him personally. Nor was it an isolated instance; other officers in Castro’s guerrilla forces shot ex-soldiers en masse without a trial, without any charges of any kind lodged against them, simply as an act of reprisal against the defeated army.
By 1961 the Cuban people’s struggle against the growing strength of Communism was becoming more determined every day. Flames devoured large warehouses and stores in Havana. Hundreds, thousands of acres planted with sugar cane were fodder for the flames; the Cuban nights were illuminated by those bonfires. Bombs destroyed telephone and electric lines and derailed trains. Armed confrontations in both the mountains and the cities constantly broke out between the patriots and the repressive forces.
And government terror tactics grew in step with the resistance. Guilty and innocent alike fell before the firing squads. In the mountains when government troops captured some of the alzados, the alzados would be shot down where they were captured, and doctors of forensic medicine would cut open their abdomens to try to find the rest of the guerrilla groups by seeing what the contents of the dead men’s stomachs were and determining where such food might be found.
Castro had declared in the auditorium of the Federation of Cuban Workers building, “We will answer violence with violence. We may not have God on our side, but we do have an infantry — and it’s the finest in the world.”
Juan Carlos Alvarez Aballí had the bad luck to be detained at his home in the middle of that period of violence. He was told only that there were some things he had to clear up at Political Police Headquarters. He was in his shirtsleeves; when he started to put on a jacket and tie, the soldiers told him he’d be back in less than an hour, he didn’t have to get all dressed up. He kissed his wife and children. He was calm and confident; after all, he knew he had done nothing wrong. One of the agents, the oldest one, even had a few words for his wife: “Don’t worry ma’am, in an hour at most I’ll bring him back myself.”
Alvarez Aballí’s brother-in-law, Juan Maristany, had been involved in conspiratorial activities, a weapons-theft plot; seeking to evade capture by Castro’s forces, he had taken asylum in a neutral embassy. That was the only reason that Alvarez Aballí was arrested now. Since the authorities couldn’t get their hands on Maristany in the embassy, at least they’d have Alvarez. So there he was, in the prison yard, awaiting a trial on charges that had no substance to them — atrial at which, he thought, he’d be found innocent and walk out a free man. That, at least, is what he thought until he heard the prosecutor’s statement of the charges. Alvarez was accused of conspiring with his brother-in-law, and the prosecutor was asking for the death penalty. When the prosecutor read him the statement, Alvarez Aballí collapsed weeping and repeating his protestations of innocence.
By the afternoon they called him to trial, he was serene; he had placed his trust in God. Firmly, sincerely, movingly, he related to the tribunal the story of his entire life. He had dedicated it wholly to his work and his family; it was the furthest life imaginable from a life of political activism. His defense attorney even dared — and it was an act of true courage — to present in evidence a letter from Maristany himself, certified by the ambassador, in which Maristany stated that he and he alone was guilty of the arms theft and explained in detail certain facts which proved that Alvarez Aballí was innocent. The tribunal rejected the letter as evidence, although they did suggest that if Maristany left the embassy and turned himself in to the authorities they would change Alvarez’s verdict.
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