Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
the dining hall in front of Circulars 3 and 4. He played very well. Later, I would sit and watch him often in the afternoon. He would get drunk whenever he could on alcohol mixed with sugar, and those days he had to lean up against one of the columns of the building, because if he didn’t he would’ve fallen over. Curiously enough, the more plastered he was, the better he played. It was this cornet player who played “Taps” when they carried out the corpses of men who had died in the prison. The Major would call us all to attention, we prisoners would stand straight and tall, and everything would stop for a few moments. The only sound was the notes of “Taps” echoing movingly through the presidio.
Carrión and I had managed to find a cell on the second floor, number 64. Boitel didn’t want to move in with us; he liked to sleep late in the morning, so he had found a cot on the sixth floor, which was an ideal place for sleeping late. Jorge Víctor, Piñango, and the rest had already settled in with some other companions. But we would all get together to eat, and into our group came Manolito and Vladimir Ramírez.
Ramírez was a psychologist who had organized an action cell which was planning an attempt on Castro’s life, using Ramírez’ apartment as a base of operations. His apartment was located across the street from El Carmelo Restaurant, which the dictator frequented. They were discovered, though, and a shoot-out led to their arrest. Vladimir and Fernando López del Toro blockaded themselves inside the walls of a colonial mansion in EI Vedado, and it took a huge police siege to make them surrender.
Mealtimes became a time for conversation, with talk about all sorts of things but especially about political events in the country. The track of the conversation always led to the fall of the regime, because every day more and more rumors were coming in about the rise of internal resistance, about acts of sabotage, about the number of counterrevolutionaries in the countryside, and about the gigantic military operations which the government had been forced to carry out against the new anti-Castro guerillas.
The mess we ate at those times was cooked by common prisoners. The food was so tasteless and unseasoned, so flat, so dull and unappetizing, that we jokingly called it La Boba — “The Old Maid” — nobody really wanted to try it a second time. When the prisoners pushed the cart loaded with the vats of food up to the gate, the Major or the gatekeeper — another member of the Mandancia, whose job was to stay by the front gate for just this sort of duty — would cry out, “Here comes La Boba! Get your tools ready!” This announcement simply meant that all the prisoners were to line up floor by floor; each man was to have his plate and a canteen cup or jar at the ready.
The menu was not very varied. For lunch, there was rice and split peas; in the afternoon, there was boiled cornmeal and a greasy, watery soup. Generally, the split peas or some other kind of peas or beans had been sent to the prison because they were spoiled, and often enough they were wormy as well. When the food was prepared from such a shipment, a layer of tiny animals floated on top of the vats. But in even the most unpleasant circumstances, the Cuban will find a vein of humor; so when the beans full of worms were coming, the gatekeeper would call out, “Split peas with protein!”
For many days at first, I virtually lived on bread, for I had a certain squeamishness about what I ate. But prison and hunger cured me of that soon enough. Weeks later I would devour those peas, any food, as fast as the next man. When someone would say that the food was spoiled or tasted bad, Carrión always answered, “Who’s ever heard of a prisoner eating because he likes the food? Prisoners eat to survive.”
And it was true. You had to eat whatever they gave you, in order to survive, and I swore to myself to put aside all those scruples and swallow whatever came along. We would sometimes have macabre contests with our spoons, fishing out the little worms and pushing them to the side. They were small, yellowish-white worms with a kind of caramel-colored spot on the head. Little by little you lost your disgust for them, and rationalized the situation: “The little worms are dead, they’ve been boiled in the steam vats, so what harm can it do to eat them?” — “Absolutely none; the only thing is that you’re not accustomed to eating them. But just remember, in Asia they eat insects.” All these arguments prepare the mind, condition it, and that is the real secret of survival — mental control. We wound up stirring the soup up with the rice without wasting any more effort fishing out the worms. After all, it was true — they were protein. I never got sick from eating them, either.
Since it was the common prisoners, supervised by a militiaman, that cooked the food for us; since we were counterrevolutionaries while they were revolutionaries — even if criminal revolutionaries; and since a revolutionary is defined by, among other things, his hostility and aggressiveness toward counterrevolutionaries, some dreadful things happened to our food from time to time.
One morning the breakfast sugar water that was brought to us in a fifty-five-gallon drum — one of those used for holding fuel — began to taste funny as its level dropped. When there were only six or eight inches of the water left, it grew bubbly. The constant churning of the big serving ladle had whipped it into a froth. The inmates stopped serving it and ran a wooden paddle around in it; the paddle bumped something hard on the bottom. They decided to pour out what was left of the sugar water — and there were two bars of soap in the bottom of the drum.
On another occasion, more than half the length of a thick cow intestine, rectum included, was floating on top of the soup; intestine was still full of cowshit. We sent the soup back.
Complaints were made to the soldier who was head of the kitchen, but he always shrugged off any personal responsibility for things that happened. He would allege that whatever happened was the cooks’ fault. We frequently found pieces of broken glass. One day the food they brought in had dead rats in it. But the worst consequences of eating spoiled food occurred when we were served poisoned split peas one day. Thousands of prisoners came down with uncontrollable diarrhea and quickly dehydrated. The authorities became frightened, since dozens and dozens of prisoners, almost unable to walk, or even speak, came down into the prison yard. Intravenous kits and saline solution were brought over, but there were not enough to go around, so they had to notify the civilian hospital in Nueva Gerona. They didn’t have enough supplies to send, either. Therefore the Ministry of the Interior sent a plane from Cuba with a shipment of intravenous equipment and other medicines and supplies. The authorities admitted that the common prisoner who was head of the cooks had stirred some toxic substance into the food. They even knew what the substance was — they said it was a liquid sprayed on the split peas to protect them against insects. They assured us that punitive measures would be taken against him. But that inmate continued as head of the kitchen for a long time — until all common prisoners were removed from the prison, in fact, which was then staffed solely by political prisoners.
Until the spring of 1961, every forty-five days the prison sold certain articles to prisoners: spices, oil, salt, cigarettes, and cigars. With these items, we could disguise La Boba, fix her up. We recooked the food and added salt, a little oil, and some spices. All that came to an end in April 1961. However, even though there were no visits, every so many days they did allow prisoners’ families to send a little package containing powdered milk, sugar, and gofio de trigo. (Gofio de trigo became a staple food additive in the prisons. In the absence of really nutritive foods, this roasted wheat flour, something like prepared wheat germ but gummier when wet, supplied what few vitamins, even calories, we subsisted on.) Prisoners also persuaded the authorities to let our families send mattresses in to us. Cuba was still in the dying days of capitalism. Those packages would lead to another of our macabre jokes, as I’ll tell shortly.
Bathing during those first months was not possible. Water still had to be brought to the prison in the tank truck, and the quota allowed us only enough water for drinking.
At dawn and at evening, there was always the headcount. We had to stand in the cell doors, but only two men per cell; all the rest of us lined up in the prison yard. All the officers were very good at the counting, but the most talented of them all was a sergeant who had served in the ranks of Batista’s army. He was very soldierly — he clicked his heels and everything. Prisoners called this sergeant by the nickname Pinguilla — “Little Prick.” With one quick glance, his eyes flew over the six floors, and if, by the way the men were arrayed, his headcount did not balance out with the list he had, he would discover