Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
heard about the sinister, dark punishment pavilions with their solitary-confinement cells. Prisoners, we had heard, were put in solitary confinement if they dared to complain about the injustices and abusive treatment committed against them on a daily basis; or they might be sent there simply because it pleased the jailers’ taste for sadism to see the prisoners lying naked on the hard, cold floor with the cell door welded shut. They would spend months there, and every day the guards would throw pails of freezing water and excrement over them. Even if a prisoner managed to control his mind, to keep his mental faculties intact, he would still almost always come out tubercular, his lungs destroyed.
And that was where we were being taken. We rode in silence, breathing deeply, trying to fill ourselves with the free air we wouldn’t breathe again for a very long time. And there were those bayonets too — swaying hypnotically, menacingly before our eyes like cobras in some nightmare, ready to sink their fangs into our throats.
But at that moment I seemed to wake up — the memory of my fallen comrades, executed by the firing squads of La Cabaña, came into my mind. I thought about Julio and his scorn for life as he defended his belief in freedom and patriotism; I thought about all of those men who marched to the firing squads with a smile on their lips; I thought about the integrity of those martyrs who had died shouting, “Viva Cuba Libre! Viva Christ the King! Down with Communism!” And I was ashamed to feel so frightened. I realized that the only way to honor the memory of those heroes was to behave with their firmness and integrity. My heart rose up to God, and I fervently prayed for Him to help me stand up to this brutality, and do what I had to do. I felt that God heard my prayer.
7
A MODEL PRISON
The prison on Isia de Pinos was at that time the largest in Cuba. It was the so-called Model Prison. The Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado had it built in the 1930s. It had six enormous circular buildings, with a much larger capacity than was needed when it was first built. Someone asked Machado why he had the prison built so big; they said it would never be filled. But Machado answered, “Don’t you worry. Somebody will come along who’ll manage to fill it up.”
That somebody was Fidel Castro.
There were 312 of us in that particular group; we were the last contingent of the largest single transfer of prisoners that had ever been carried out in the Cuban prison system. Political prisoners were being concentrated in unimaginable numbers at Isla de Pinos.
The main gates of the first line of security opened to let the procession of trucks through. Handsome, well-cared-for gardens were the first thing the newly arrived prisoner saw. Common prisoners watered and weeded the rosebushes and hibiscus plants. The gardens were bounded at the rear by an arc made up of the Headquarters Building in the center and rows of houses for the officers on each side. Behind that arc rose the enormous masses of the “Circulars,” which housed the inmates.
“Get out, you sons of bitches! Now you’re really prisoners! You’re on the Island!”
The insult slapped us in the face, but no one responded. We began to jump out of the truck. In front of me, two of my comrades were handcuffed together; one of them tried to find some support before he jumped, but a guard came up behind him and kicked him off the truck to the ground. As he fell, he pulled his handcuff mate off with him, spraining his wrist with the metal bracelet. Up on the truck, the guard broke out into a mocking laugh picked up by the rest of the soldiers. One of them walked over to the two prisoners trying to stand up, battered and bruised by the fall, and said to them, “See how nice we are here? We even help you get off the truck.” And once again came the mocking laughter. The rest of us there were completely powerless. We didn’t even dare protest, because we thought that if this was just the beginning, who dared find out too soon what the rest would be like.
Immediately, a jeep pulled up; they asked about one of us, a man who had been involved in an incident in which a militiaman had been killed in an exchange of fire with anti-Castro rebels. Two men also engaged in the incident had been executed by firing squad; this man had been sentenced to thirty years.
“Where is that son of a bitch?” screamed a sergeant, getting out of the jeep in a fury.
“That’s him,” one of the soldiers who had escorted us from Havana answered. “Let’s go, get a move on. Now you’re going to see who it is you’re dealing with.”
They pushed the prisoner toward the jeep, and the sergeant and his troop rained blows on him as they shoved him in. One of the guards struck out with the butt of his rifle, and a low moan escaped the poor man’s lips. He was hardly more than a boy yet.
“Take him to the punishment pavllion,” yelled the tall fat sergeant, who seemed to be the one in charge of that group.
“And the rest of you,” he went on, speaking to those of us standing there waiting, “get into formation over there. On the double. Get a move on.”
We lined up in ranks, and they began to check our names against the list the escorts had brought from Cuba.
“Now then, which ones were in the little strike?” the sergeant sneered.
The guards called out Cheo Guerra, Guillermo, and others. Several militiamen broke off from the group, their rifles raised, their bayonets fixed, and pointed to the path the prisoners were to take, a road running into the rest of the prison installations.
“Run! On the double!” they shouted at the prisoners’ backs. They prodded and jabbed at them with their bayonets. We saw them run off, and we were horrified to see, as blood tinged their thighs, the color of their pants grow darker and darker. One of them stumbled and fell, and on top of him landed the guards’ boots; they kicked him until he lay there unconscious in a pool of blood. He was dragged away by his arms. This was one of the favorite diversions of the guards, as we later learned. But for us, at that moment, it was a spetacle out of Dante. How far we were from imagining that there would be many times when from our cells we would see that same ferocity, that same viciousness, unleashed against other prisoners who kept arriving, day after day, at the Island!
“Okay, let’s go. Up these stairs!” said the leader of the escort, and we began to walk up the steps, which led to some minor offices and the General Headquarters of the prison; once there, we were led along a corridor. Not for a single moment had they left off insulting and harassing us.
We came to the end of the corridor and went down a stairway to the back part of the central building, a kind of basement where militiamen were already waiting for us before several piles of prison clothes. These were the uniforms of the old Army, but with one black P on the back and two others on the trouser legs.
“All right! Get those clothes off, all of you! Everybody! Strip!” Everything was a rush, everything had to be done in a hurry, under the constant menace of being beaten or run through with a bayonet. We began to take off our clothes — shirt, pants, undershirt, and underwear, everything lay at last at our feet.
“Shoes, too, goddammit!” another guard yelled. And we took off our shoes and socks too.
It is impossible for me to describe what I felt at that moment. I suppose the other prisoners thought and felt the same thing I did, standing there like that, naked, facing the wall, with those militiamen and guards laughing and making fun of us, cracking jokes about our nakedness. There is nothing so depressing as being trapped in such a situation.
“Okay, turn around now and stand still until you’re called,” said one of the soldiers.
They began calling us one by one over to a bench which stood between us and the guards, where they would carry out the search of our property, if the little that we had brought with us — some cans of jam, medicine, toothpaste, soap, underwear — could be called property. But they looted it anyway. Anything that was of any value, or that they simply took a liking to, was “confiscated.” My watch attracted Lieutenant Paneque’s attention, and he almost broke my wrist when he ripped it off me. Now I definitely gave it up for lost. They were like Vikings or Huns, dividing up