Against All Hope. Armando Valladares

       9

       SEARCHES AND MASS RELOCATIONS

      There was search after search in Circular 3. The authorities constantly, if vainly, kept trying to find the clandestine radio. Guards would mass at the exit of the Circular and wield their chains and bayonets with complete impunity. Their victims would dodge through the hail of blows, ducking and trying to cover unprotected, vulnerable heads with arms already aching and bruised.

      In one of these searches, a prisoner stumbled and fell headlong from the beating the guards were giving him, and he lay there inert. Other prisoners ran around him or jumped over his prostrate body. Each man’s private terror was all that existed at those moments; stopping to aid a fallen companion would have meant getting more kicks and blows for your trouble. Under those circumstances, the instinct of self-preservation won out over pity — the prisoners kept on running, dodging, running.

      And the guards were screaming, yelling; they always did that. It was a mechanism for firing themselves up, getting themselves agitated. Probably striking other men for no cause, no motive, was not easy, even for the most heartless of our guards. They were men with wives and children. Some of them lived in the little houses at the exit of the prison. They would have just come in, still wrapped in the warmth of their homes, still not fully free of sleep, and they would immediately be given a bayonet, a chain, or a truncheon to attack men whom they had never even crossed words with, had never taken even verbal, let alone physical, offense from. What must those guards have felt when the first prisoners looked fearfully out the bars and they had to raise their bayonets and strike them?

      After passing through the main gate, the prisoners kept running, into the corral, trying to dodge through the gauntlet of guards. Suddenly, a tall black prisoner appeared, dressed in full uniform. He was wearing little round, gold-rimmed, old-fashioned glasses; on his left forearm he was carrying a small wooden bench; in his right hand there was a fan, which he was calmly fanning himself with. This was Dr. Velázco, one of our best doctors. He spoke the same way he walked — deliberately and unhurriedly, pronouncing every letter, every syllable. He was utterly imperturbable. Other prisoners were still running past, but Dr. Velázco maintained that same rhythmic pace, giving the impression that he was strolling through his garden at home on a gentle afternoon.

      There was another search a while later, in Circular 2, when I saw Dr. Velázco act the same way. The guards were standing on the stairways savagely beating the men coming down the stairs. Already almost all of us were downstairs in the prison yard; there were only a few stragglers, among them Dr. Velázco. As always, he walked slowly, unhurriedly, deliberately. From the yard, his friends called out to him, begging him to hurry so the guards wouldn’t beat him. When he came to the last flight of stairs, though, the guards in fury unleashed a rain of blows on his back. Dr. Velázco didn’t move a muscle, as though it weren’t his back taking the beating. A howl of indignation arose: “That’s the doctor! Stop hitting him!” we called. But what did the guards care if he was a doctor?

      Dr. Velázco came down the last steps, and even though the blows did not cease, he did not flinch, he did not move one whit faster. One of the guards, who was just about to reach the second floor, came back down a few steps and leaned out over the railing, holding himself with one arm. With the other arm, the arm wielding a machete, he let fall the last blow. Those of us awaiting Dr. Velázco below surrounded him; we were very concerned. Still speaking deliberately, he told us that it was nothing ... and he found a place next to the tower, set his little wooden bench down, and sat down to fan himself. I knew how much his back must have burned and throbbed; I don’t think I could have kept my composure in such pain. But he was unmoved and apparently undaunted.

      One afternoon during this time they called Boitel out. They were transferring him to La Cabaña, where they were going to put him through another trial; he was to get twenty-five years for the cause célèbre, Capri No. 600.

      Prisoners were frequently sent to Isla de Pinos from various jails across the island. About that time, the Ministry of the Interior had begun the practice of sending the prisoner as far away from his family as possible so as to make contact among family members more difficult and keep the doors to the jails from always being thronged with mothers and wives. This meant that prisoners whose homes were at the extreme western end of Cuba were sent to jail in the province of Oriente, five or six hundred miles away, where it would be virtually impossible for their families to travel with any frequency to visit them.

      The government followed this strategy not only with prisoners or captured guerrillas, but also even with private citizens, especially campesinos. Long before the “strategic hamlets” had been employed in Vietnam, Castro had already put them into practice in Cuba. The first of these hamlets was called Ciudad Sandino, Sandino City.

      Early in 1961, prisoners who had belonged to the rebel bands began to flow into the Model Prison on Isla de Pinos; these were those rebels who had been operating in Escambray out of numerous pockets of guerrilla concentration. Through them we learned details of the gigantic operation that the government had set in motion — more than sixty thousand troops, most of them militia, were participating in what was called the “Cleanup” of Escambray. This led directly to the relocation projects and the “strategic hamlets.”

      Suppression of the guerrillas was expensive for Castro. In the newspaper Granma, the official organ of the Party, in May 1970, Raúl Castro retrospectively added up the toll of those years of struggle against the rebel forces that had been fighting throughout the country, and he admitted that more than five hundred soldiers had died and that the struggle had cost some 800 million pesos. There had been 179 guerrilla bands made up of 3,591 men, Fidel’s brother reported.

      To hide the fact that there was such fierce resistance to the Communist government on the part of the people living in the countryside, the government called them “bandits” and a special force was created to deal with the insurgents. This force was called the Batallones de Lucha Contra Bandidos, the Bandit Control Battalions, better known by the Spanish initials, LCB.

      In the government’s attempt to wipe out these forces, not only guerrillas themselves but also those campesinos who acted as guides, messengers, and contacts were executed. In the area of Escambray, campesinos in great numbers were opposed to the Castro regime, and those who did not actually join up with the guerrillas cooperated with them in many ways. The land was very fertile and under the campesinos’ hands yielded plantains, various kinds of tubers, and all sorts of other foodstuffs. The people also raised pigs and poultry on their little parcels of land. The government believed, not unnaturally, that the rebels were being supplied from these sources, so the leaders developed a reconcentration plan to keep supplies from the rebels. All the families with land in Escambray and its foothills would be cleared out.

      The day the evictions began, trucks from the INRA (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) and Soviet-made ZIL campaign trucks full of troops stopped in front of the humble houses, some with dirt floors and roofs thatched with palm leaves. The countryfolk were permitted to take only a few clothes and personal articles with them. Their fruits and vegetables, poultry, pigs, and the occasional cow were confiscated by the INRA. The troops destroyed their garden plots, set fire to their houses, and poisoned their wells. This scorched-earth policy, eliminating the sources of supply to the guerrillas, was carried out most thoroughly and methodically.

      The women and children of the campesino families were separated from the men and transferred to