Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
brazenness, they argued over the most trivial items — some socks, a razor, a pen, or a ballpoint.
I was wearing a crucifix that a young friend of mine, Neno Medina, had given me as a gift. Neno was hardly sixteen years old, but Castro hadn’t managed to deceive him. His whole family had asked for political asylum in Venezuela during the dictatorship of Batista because his father was one of Castro’s revolutionaries. Neno may not have “known,” but he intuited that Communism was no good for Cuba. Neno called Fidel “Fidelovsky” as early as 1960. He was forced to enter the militia, though he knew the Revolution that his father had fought and died for had been betrayed. He was sent to the mountains of Escambray as a driver in a military operation intended to besiege and strangle the guerrilla strongholds from which the rebels launched their attacks against Castro. Neno could not stand that, after all, he was on the rebels’ side — so he made a mortal decision: driving a truck full of troops, he floorboarded the accelerator and steered the truck over a precipice. Everyone died.
Lieutenant Paneque’s hand stretched out toward the crucifix and grabbed it with fury. He brutally stomped and kicked the wooden cross until it was scattered in pieces across the floor.
Suddenly, at the opposite end of the room, there were bursts of laughter and outcries of indignation, and almost immediately a prisoner who was protesting lunged at one of the guards searching him. Several militiamen jumped on him. The prisoner fought, bit, scratched, until the guards beat him to the ground. His head was smashed and his face was covered with the blood gushing from his nose. He tried to stand up, but they booted him to the floor once more. The rest of the guards surrounding us stepped back immediately when the fight broke out and gripped their rifles and machine guns nervously, though nonetheless menacingly.
“Nobody move! Put your hands up and careful what you do or we shoot!”
They were afraid, they were nervous; they were actually fearful that unarmed, naked men might try something, and I felt that we somehow grew before that rabble who could hardly hold their weapons up for the trembling of their hands. Immediately, they took out the man that had attacked the guard. We didn’t know what had happened, what had provoked the incident, we only saw his wounds and the marks of the boots that had kicked him senseless. Two guards dragged him out of the room, leaving a trail of blood on the floor. Many of us thought he’d surely die from the beating and the wounds.
Later, we found out that the guard who was searching him had come across a photograph among the articles he was rummaging through and had asked the prisoner what whore house the woman in the picture worked in. That was the last straw. It was a photograph of our companion’s mother — a mother like mine, like everybody’s, one of the many mothers who suffered the terrible pain of separation from her children, of knowing that they were confined in jails where outrage, physical and psychological mistreatment, and abuse were the order of the day. The man couldn’t control himself when the guard sneeringly insulted his mother. Blinded by rage, tears of fury in his eyes, he attacked his offender. If only that poor mother could know that far from home, her son was being dragged out of the room almost dead from a beating the guards had given him for defending her!
Once the search and sacking were done, each inmate was given a change of clothing. Those who wore small or medium were given large-sized clothes, and the big or fat men were given smalls; we had to put the clothes on and leave the room dressed.
The thin ones had no problems — we simply wadded the pants around our waists and rolled up the cuffs and the shirtsleeves. For the fat prisoners, though, it was an ordeal. Tito struggled to try to pull on pants he couldn’t possibly wear. At last he managed to get into them, but there was a gap of six inches at the waist; there was no way to button them. They were so short they came halfway up his calves. This was another of the garrison’s diversions.
As we left, we passed a poster on the basement wall with a thought from Fidel Castro:
THE REVOLUTION IS GREENER THAN PALM TREES
We formed up in twos and began to walk. Guards prowled back and forth down both sides of the files. The entrance gate in the second security cordon opened; a guardhouse of concrete, with spotlights and a machine gun pointed toward the buildings, stood as though at attention at the gate. Now we were inside the prison.
From that point, the gardens were completely lost to sight. The gate behind us had opened onto a completely foreign world, which many of us now entering would never leave. We walked between Building 5 and Building 6 — enormous rectangular buildings, five stories high — and before us rose the huge, seven-story, iron-and-concrete piles which were the Circulars. Though built to house 930 inmates each, they would come to shelter 1,300. There were four of those buildings; at their center, as though the prison area were a great die with the number five up, stood the dining hall. It too was circular, though only two stories high. It could handle five thousand men at one sitting; the kitchen and storerooms were in that building too.
We kept walking on between Circulars 1 and 2. From dozens of windows, prisoners waved and shouted at us, but the guards told us not to shout or raise our hands to respond. Anyone who tried it was beaten. We marched along an asphalt walk around the side of the dining hall and stopped before, the large iron gate of Circular 4, our destination. Above the door, there was an ironic sign: WELCOME TO CIRCULAR 4.
The entrance had a large guardhouse made of unpainted concrete blocks and roofed with corrugated sheets of cast fiber-cement. Through the windows, the prisoners who had arrived the day before shouted at us, called by name to those of us that they had met at La Cabaña. But the guards were not speaking. It was as though when they arrived at that point, they didn’t have to have any relationship with us whatsoever. We were utterly other to them now. And that lifted my spirits; I dared to raise my head and look up, up to the highest barred windows of the fifth and sixth floors, from which hands were waving in greeting. Then I slowly lowered my eyes down the side of the building to the windows of the first floor, which were very near me. The men behind those iron palisades looked like skeletons; their faces were white and waxen from lack of sun. One of them was so emaciated that he seemed unreal. He didn’t speak, he didn’t wave or gesture, he was simply there, staring — he looked to me like a figure in a wax museum. However, not one of the men there could have spent more than two years and a few days in that jail. Just thinking about it sent a shiver of terror up my spine. Two years! I would never be able to stand it. How could they still be alive? Why hadn’t they died?
At last they opened the entrance gate, after having counted us several times. A throng of prisoners waited on the ground floor in a circular prison yard about eighty yards in circumference. In the center, a concrete tower rose to the height of the fourth floor. At the top, a little balcony with a railing for the watch ran around it. A low metal roof opened onto the balcony. The tower could be reached only by way of a tunnel which ran from the outside, so that soldiers could enter it without having to come inside the Circular itself.
Around the Circular, opening onto the inner well like an enormous beehive, were the cells. They were lined up one after another, ninety-three cells to a floor. In front of them, circling each floor, was a balcony with an iron railing, so that the balconies were hallways of a sort, along which one could safely walk. Communication from one floor to another was by way of a large marble stairway and four other, smaller stairways, which connected the ground floor to the first floor of cells. In the prison yard, there on the ground floor, there were no cells, only washbasins and showers. The cells themselves were small, with one large window barred with square iron rods. The sixth floor had no walls or divisions — it had been used before as a confinement and punishment area for common prisoners. Several cells had been there at one time, but they had been demolished. Now, because of the overpopulation, they were being used as well. This building, Circular 4, had bars on the cells of the first floor, unlike any of the other Circulars. These cells too had been used as punishment cages before the influx of political prisoners. The rest of the cells had no bars, and one might stroll along the corridors or go up and down the stairs from one floor to another.
The building was like a Roman circus. Everyone was talking, and yelling at the same time. A few of us went up to the base of the tower and dropped our bundles so we could rest and take our bearings. High up on the other floors, leaning on their elbows on