Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
up.
As the jails filled, hundreds of people, including some women with children, were crammed into the prison yard of La Cabaña in the open air. There were prisoners in the moats as well, surrounded by machine guns. The only moat left free of people was the one in which the firing squads operated. In the moats of Castillo del Morro, too, a fortress in Havana, thousands of people were held for two days without food or water. At the end of the two days, the authorities turned a hose on them so they could quench their thirst.
Dozens of people died in those overcrowded conditions. Some pregnant women miscarried, and others gave birth right there on the ground, assisted by the other women. The guards threatened all and sundry with machine gunning if the invasion triumphed.
The Blanquita Theater, the largest theater in Cuba, was converted into a gigantic prison which lodged more than eight thousand people. In five days the people jammed into the theater received food on only four occasions. The Sports Palace sheltered thousands more. One night, just for kicks apparently, the militiamen guarding them began screaming for everyone to get down on the ground. They fired their machine guns over them; several people were wounded.
The persecution and repression became almost annihilation — every citizen was a potential enemy. If you weren’t in the armed forces or the militia or couldn’t prove your revolutionary militancy, you would be detained — or worse.
There is no data on the number of people shot throughout the Island during those several days, but execution squads were functioning in the regiment at Pinar del Río, on the military base at San Antonio de los Baños, in El Morro, in La Cabaña, in El Castillo de San Severino in Matanzas province, in La Campana, and in Camagüey and Oriente provinces. Often they didn’t even put the bodies into coffins — they merely stripped them and put them into plastic bags and buried them.
It was April 16,1961, in the Colón Cemetery in Havana, and as Castro was shaking the hands of the mourners for the men killed in the bombardments of the l5th, six anonymous corpses were brought in through the back gate, in silence, with no flowers, no wreaths, no family members or friends to say a few words of farewell. An officer from the Political Police and two soldiers in a white Volkswagen van picked up the corpses and carried them to an area under military control, where they were thrown into a common grave. Juan Hernández, one of the soldiers in that detail, was later sentenced to prison for conspiracy. He told us about the operation in detail. The bodies were those of men executed peremptorily as soon as the invasion began.
Emboldened by the government’s turning back the Bay of Pigs invaders, the prison authorities felt they could exercise ruthless control over us. Repression became more violent and systematic, less “occasional” — we were informed officially that the dynamite would remain in the foundations, to blow us up if there was another invasion attempt. Many prisoners simply refused to accept the fact that the dynamite was planted down there, and there were even those who said that the boxes had never contained explosives, that it was all a great charade to intimidate us and keep us in line. Others did face up to the reality of the dynamite, but they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the dynamite would be used — rather they believed it was an instrument of political blackmail. The psychological defense mechanisms at work in their minds were very complex there was a flat rejection of an infinitely threatening reality. It was, indeed, very difficult to accept the fact that we were living on top of a powder keg.
Some men dreamed up elaborate “security” measures to be taken in case worst came to worst — poor wretches grasping at anything anybody said. One guy said you had to bite down on a piece of wood so you wouldn’t burst when the dynamite exploded. So people hung pieces of wood about the thickness of a cigar around their necks; they planned to bite down on them as they flew through the air. There was an exodus to the sixth floor — many prisoners thought the farther they got from the basement, the better chance there was of escaping unharmed. Other, more realistic prisoners scratched their names and prisoner numbers on little homemade metal tags and hung them around their necks so they could at least be identified afterward.
One man, Luis Lemus, known as Americanito, decided he’d go have a look for himself. He wanted to test some of the theories, I suppose. He managed to get down into the basement by a complicated operation which involved sliding down through one of the vertical tunnels for the plumbing pipes. Someone else went to where three American CIA officers were being held, to find out what they thought about the matter; they might have a more professional opinion. These men were trained in explosives and demolition; one of them, Daniel Caswell, was really an expert. He was given all the information we had, including samples of the explosives, detonators, and so forth which Americanito had brought up from below. They came to the conclusion that everything was set to blow us up. There was a double, “fail-safe” detonation system — electrical and mechanical. There were enough explosives to reduce our building to rubble, and the same was true for the other Circulars, which had been mined with dynamite the same day ours had.
At the back of the punishment-cell pavilion some two hundred fifty to three hundred yards from the Circular, behind a little earthen bulwark, was the control hut from which the charges would be detonated. All the connections and underground plastic tubes led to that site. The explosion would be so shattering that even those who depressed the detonator handles would die, and the entire presidio would be converted into a blackened crater.
Commander García Olivera, chief of the Army Engineer Corps, and the captain from the Political Police known as Mario were the leaders of the mining operation. A group of technicians led by another soldier, a thin, gawky man called Chanito — sarcastically, “Lightning” — was in charge of checking, every day, all the machinery of death that had been installed.
This group of technicians would often walk smugly between the Circulars and make motions with their hands as though depressing the detonator, and then they would make a gesture simulating the explosion.
Those soldiers’ mission was to murder six thousand prisoners. What must they have felt? Their sadism marked them as truly mentally ill. Years later we learned that two of them wound up in an insane asylum which the Ministry of the Interior maintains for its employees. There the authorities house the military, so that no one can find out about the horrors that drove them mad.
One morning the technicians and some soldiers arrived in several trucks and began unloading boxes and taking other boxes out of the basement. They were replacing the dynamite with a surer and more powerful explosive, one which wouldn’t go off “sympathetically,” but only from an initial blast from another explosive. They filled in the tower in the prison yard with a ton of TNT, thereby converting it into a four-story fragmentation grenade of thick concrete, whose explosion would generate tremendous heat and tons of shrapnel, and produce a shock wave more than sufficient to kill us all.
A group of our men, expert in explosives themselves, set about organizing teams to try to do something to neutralize the authorities’ plans. All their energy was concentrated on deactivating the explosives. But the operation had to be discreet; not everyone could know about it, and the team members never went into much detail about what they were doing. They tried to work in secret as much as they could. But even the informers cooperated. After all, they were sure they would be blown up like everybody else; the Communists weren’t likely to come take them out of the Circulars when they decided to kill the rest of us. In order to stop leaks to the outside, a group of inmates was assigned to read all the letters, which once a month or every forty-five days, we were allowed to send. This was to keep anyone working on the project from inadvertently writing something that would give away the plan.
Americanito went on exploring the basement. He brought up samples of the fuses that had been left behind down there, and he drew up plans with the placement of the charges.
The mechanical system, using a fuse called Primacord, was the first system deactivated. The men in charge of that task did impeccable work. We knew that government technicians tested to make sure the fuse had not been cut; they picked it up at its two ends and yanked on it. If it grew taut, they assumed it was still intact, that it hadn’t been cut or tampered with. The fuse was somewhat like a garden hose — a hollow tube of insulating material filled with powdered TNT. Our deactivation team made a cut on the bottom and took out about