Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
led to the cells for those condemned to death. With him went another prisoner who had better luck — he was removed from the cells moments before Alvarez Aballí was carried to the firing squad. This man told us that Alvarez Aballí became somehow larger, grander when he was faced with the fact of his own death, and spent all his time praying. He embraced his friend in farewell when the time came, but not a single tear rose to his eyes.
When they took him out and led him toward the moat, he passed in front of the portraits of Fidel and Raúl Castro. He paused a moment and then exclaimed, “And to think that because of those two wretches there are about to be five orphans!” Angrily, he turned toward Lieutenant Manolito, head of the prison, and said to him, “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
Throughout the whole extent of the island, the firing squads were carrying out their executions. It was during those days that Captain Antonio Nuñez Jimenez declared that from that moment on, the year 1961, officially designated the Year of Education, would be called the Year of the Firing Squad. And his prediction came true.
Men who had been sentenced to death did not return to the galeras after their trial. They were led to tiny cells located down at the end of galera 22, alongside the cells for Revolutionary Army soldiers sentenced to prison terms for robbery, drug abuse, and so forth — “common crimes” as opposed to “political crimes.” The prisoners sentenced to death would have to walk down the entire length of the galera of those common prisoners. The common prisoners were kept separate from us political prisoners by the little yard surrounded with high fences just at the main gate. We could see them from our yard, but there was no chance of physical contact with them.
It might have been that they thought they could score some points with the prison guards, or it might have been that they were actually channeling their hatred of those who stood up against the Revolution that many of them had supported, and still supported. For whatever reason, all through that walk, those common prisoners, “delinquents,” real criminals, would harass the men sentenced to death, who would have their hands tied behind their backs and be led by guards; they would insult them, spit at them, throw things at them, push them. And it was not solely those few moments of walking down the galera that were exploited by the common criminals to harass the political prisoners. There were even some who would follow them to their cells on that improvised Death Row to which the common prisoners had access, and keep on insulting them, screaming at them there, denying them in their last hours the peace and seclusion that would have allowed them to pray, meditate over their lives, be still.
The guards did nothing about the harassment. The authorities did not even deign to disguise their approval of those proceedings. On the contrary, whenever there were political prisoners on Death Row, the authorities would pass out liquor to the common criminals to get them drunk so they’d sing the “Internationale” and crow about the triumphs of the Revolution and the beating the counterrevolutionaries had taken and were taking.
Some of the prisoners spoke to the authorities and requested them to put a stop to the delinquents’ standing in front of their cells insulting and yelling at them. But the authorities had not an iota of compassion for them. From the moment the condemned men came out of the tribunal trials with their hands tied behind their backs and began walking to the cells of that Death Row, their escorts pushed and shoved them, mocked and laughed at them. The guards even stripped them of their shoes and threw them to the common prisoners, who fought over them like vultures.
And when the platoon of guards led them to the firing squad, the farewell the political prisoners received from the common prisoners in galera 22 was cries of “Viva Fidel Castro! Viva la Revolución!”
When the van with the members of the firing squad passed through the entrance that opened into the moats, the unmistakable sound of its motor would be heard throughout the galeras and of course in Death Row, where the men knew the decisive moment was at hand. Througout the galeras, the murmur of voices in prayer would begin. Otherwise, we prisoners, lying on our cots, kept an oppressive, painful silence, a silence made even more painful by our absolute impotence to prevent the death of one who until a few hours before had shared with us his hopes, his dreams, his troubles. A throng of images and thoughts whirled through our heads during those moments: his fatherless children, his widow, his mother prostrate with grief. And the thought too, which made us shiver, that the man the firing squad awaited could well be any one of us. Often I would suddenly see myself with my hands tied, gagged, led into the moat ... descending those steps to the wooden stake before the wall of sandbags, the spotlights trained on it ... officers shoving me against it and pulling a piece of rope tight around my waist ... the soldiers raising their rifles and deafening thunder echoing all along the moats. ... That could happen to me; I expected it. Every night I rehearsed that journey. I could see every inch of it in my mind. I knew the route by memory — every step, the wooden stake. ...
There were nights when there would be ten or twelve executions. You would hear the bars of the man’s cell door and someone coming to the bars to see his friend and cry out to him the last goodbye. There was no way to sleep in the galeras. That was when God began to become a constant companion of mine, and when death became a door into the true life, a step from the shadows into eternal light.
The blows of the hammers nailing together the wooden coffin would echo from the stone walls of the moats. The corpse was not given over to the relatives so they could hold a wake and funeral or accompany it to the holy ground of a cemetery. Instead, a van with INRA (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) painted on its side took the body to Colón Cemetery, where it was buried in a common grave, in a plot reserved for that purpose by the Ministry of the Interior. In the van would be an officer from the Political Police and several soldiers. The body was buried without a marker or headstone or anything else to identify it. The family did not even have the sad privilege of knowing where their loved one was buried.
But it was not only corpses that disappeared; some detainees were secretly subjected to interrogations and, when the authorities had finished, taken directly from Political Police Headquarters to the firing squad. We could see that happen sometimes from our galeras. Once when I was in the prison yard with a group of my friends, I saw them take down a gagged man with his hands tied behind his back. He was dressed in olive green. They shot him hurriedly. He had not come out of that prison; no one knew who he was. And that happened many times — men were executed and buried secretly.
6
ISLA DE PINOS
When the guards had something they wanted to announce to the prisoners, they would broadcast it over two loudspeakers installed in the prison yard. One afternoon at the end of the headcount, the loudspeakers began to blare out a list of prisoners who were to get all their belongings together immediately. These prisoners were being transferred.
While the names on the list were being called out in groups, a total silence reigned throughout the jail. Every man strained to hear whether his name was called. The loudspeakers went on chanting their litany for what seemed a very long time; the names were all called out twice.
I heard my name called, and I left the cell door to go get my things ready. In front of me Pedro Luis Boitel and beside me Alfredo Carrión were also getting their bags together. The men in my galera whose names had been called had already begun to throw their possessions into canvas sacks. There was a kind of anguish in the air; the authorities had never said where we were being transferred. But we could guess — leaving La Cabaña, and such large numbers of men, could only mean one destination: Isla de Pinos.
The transfer to that prison, which was located on an island south of Cuba, was a terrible blow to our spirits. Horror stories were told of what went on there. We all knew that visits had been suspended there, and that just a few days before a man named Monteiras had been kicked to death. Terror reigned on Isla de Pinos. But even more daunting to us than the treatment we might get — I’m sure the stories didn’t seem quite real to us — was being taken so far away from our families, being cut off from news and visits. At least in La Cabaña, news of our families came sometimes as often as twice a week.
That