Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
a prisoner so much as leaned against the cell door at the moment the count was being taken, he would be carried off to the punishment cells. He would be beaten by Sergeant Naranjito, who never failed to carry the cavalry sword which he had inherited from the days he was in Batista’s rural guard. Naranjito was a true sadist; his favorite pastime and greatest pleasure consisted of running the prisoners to the punishment-cell pavilion, hacking at them with the broad side of the saber all the way.
The punishment-cell pavilion was located beyond the Circulars and the two rectangular one-story buildings, alongside the chapel, in some of whose large rooms common prisoners were lodged. The other building in that area, exactly in front of the punishment pavilion, was the hospital. Batista had left it very well equipped — it had a modern X-ray laboratory, a medical laboratory, an operating room, a pharmacy, a dental office, and all the rest — but its use for medical care of prisoners was kept to a minimum. All its rooms opened onto an interior patio.
Fidel Castro had been held prisoner in one of the rooms of that hospital, but he had been allowed visitors, national and international news, uncensored books, sun, unlimited correspondence, a conjugal pavilion, and any food he wanted. He had never been mistreated; they had never so much as pushed him. Now the authorities had Húber Matos there, one of the men who had fought beside Castro in the mountains. Húber Matos had come down from the Sierra Maestra with Castro holding the rank of commander, a title he had well earned in combat; but he diverged from the Marxist line of the Revolution, so he wrote a letter to Castro resigning his commission and his office as Military Chief of the Revolutionary Army in Camagüey Province. Castro accused him of being an ingrate and a traitor and sent him to jail, sentencing him and several of his officers to twenty years in prison. There was a special gaurd for Húber Matos. He was not guarded by the garrison of the presidio, but rather by a special group selected very carefully from among the Political Police. Castro feared the sympathies which the ex-commander could draw on among the ranks of the rebel army. Matos was held completely incommunicado from the rest of the prisoners. Even his food was brought in uncooked to his place of detention, so as to avoid any contact with other prisoners. It would be 1966 before Matos would finally leave his solitary confinement for the first time and enter into contact with the rest of the political prisoners.
One afternoon, from a window on the fifth floor, someone shouted that they were taking prisoners out of the punishment cells. The punishment-cell pavilion and the hospital could be seen perfectly from Circulars 3 and 4. Every two or three months, the authorities took out a number of prisoners, generally when the pavilion was overcrowded and they needed space to punish others. Among that group of released prisoners were Cheo Guerra and Guillermo Díaz Lanz, who had been sent there on our first day at Isla de Pinos. They had grown so gaunt that their bones were practically tearing through their skin. Their eyes were sunken, they were as pale as candlewax, and their faces were covered by a months-long growth of beard which made them almost unrecognizable.
They told us about the torments and miseries they had been through there. The common prisoners controlled everything. The punished prisoners were shut up in cells with the doors almost completely sealed with a sheet of iron. They had not had a bath in all that time, and they had known nothing of the outside world. Sometimes the common prisoners, by order of the posted militia, would throw pails of cold water on them, and sometimes dirty water as well, which had been used to rinse out the rags used for cleaning the floors.
News, rumors, and gossip were like a drug for a great number of prisoners. I had read about this phenomenon in books about concentration camps, but I had never thought it would be anything so complex, or that so many men would be sustained, in many cases, by simple information. Communists are perfectly aware of what information means to the prisoner, since by keeping him in touch with outside reality it allows him to put prison reality into perspective. Everything the Communists did, then, was directed expressly toward breaking that link, toward isolating the imprisoned man even more. During this period, they were still a little clumsy and green in their practices, but slowly, as the staff of the prisons and the Political Police were sent off and trained in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, their techniques grew more refined, more scientific, more inhumane, more psychologically destructive.
The mail was a constant frustration for us. When we first arrived, we were allowed to send a brief telegram telling our families where we were. The prison rules permitted us to receive one telegram and one letter, written on one side only of the paper, from our families monthly. Those of us who were lucky enough to receive the letters sent to us, which not all of us were, sometimes could hardly read them. Slogans — “The Fatherland or death,” “We will overcome,” and the like — would be rubber-stamped one on top of another, so that the dark ink of the rubber stamp would obscure the text of the letters.
About that time, I received a letter from my mother. She told me that she and my father had come to the prison to try to persuade the authorities to let them see me. Obviously nothing had come of that.
Newspapers were never allowed into the prison, and if one of the guards discovered a prisoner with one, the prisoner was taken to the punishment cells under a hail of blows. But in Circular 3, Macurán, an ex-soldier of the defeated army, had managed to put together a rudimentary radio which drove all the soldiers of the garrison crazy. They had conducted one search after another trying to find it, but it had always eluded them. When news came in over Macurán’s radio, six copies were made immediately, one for each floor and the news would be read out to small groups, of men. The guard on the tower had to be watched, but very few times during that period did the guards go up to the observation tower. Good news lifted the prisoners’ spirits into the clouds, and when the group dissolved, many men would exhibit signs of almost manic optimism and elation. There were even those who would follow the one man who had read the news into the next circle, to hear him read it again. It was really like a drug, an addiction.
The prisoners had invented a sort of sign language using their hands and fingers. It was similar to the sign language used by deaf-mutes, but not nearly so sophisticated. For example, circling one of the railings with the whole hand, as though gripping a baseball bat, was the letter D. Putting two fingers across a bar corresponded to the letter N and three fingers stood for M. This permitted the prisoners to communicate with amazing speed. It might easily have looked like something out of bedlam to a spectator who didn’t know what was going on, seeing those men behind their bars moving their hands like men possessed, opening and closing their fists or touching the iron bars several times. The news from Macurán’s radio — or gossip, for that matter — could be sent by this method over from Circular 3 and copied down by us in Circular 4. The two buildings were separated by only the thin strip of asphalt walkway.
But Circulars 1 and 2 were farther away, so hand language was impossible. We established communication with them, though, using Morse code. There were quite a few telegraph operators among us, and others of us learned it from them. A cardboard ruler or some other little piece of stiff white paper would be employed as a transmitter. One slap sideways with this little ruler was equivalent to dot; toward the front, dash. A while later communications were perfected when we put together a homemade blinker. Whistles made out of empty toothpaste tubes were also used, and thus was sonic communication born.
Speaking or calling from one Circular to another was prohibited. If someone was caught at it, he was sent at once to the punishment cages. And it wasn’t hard for the guards to catch prisoners. The guards walked beats around the Circulars. Outside each cell, under the window, the cell number was painted very prominently. The guard could easily see, then, which cell contained the rule-breaking prisoner. And of course there was no way to escape.
Keeping up communications was a first-priority task, and someone had managed to string a line for sending letters between the two Circulars. To shoot them over, all folded up, they used a sort of slingshot made of pieces of rubber tubing taken from the intravenous equipment. The projectile was a piece of lead to which a fine thread was attached. This thread was obtained by unraveling a nylon sock with much patient labor — the same work the textile factory did, but in reverse. T-shirts, sheets, or any other woven fabric might also be used.
The first times they tried to shoot a thread across with a letter, a problem became evident: the shot was so fast that however much