Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
well and put a cylindrical tube into it the same diameter as the fuse. Then they carefully sewed up the cut. The fuse lay on the ground, so when they applied a little dirt to the seam, the alteration was perfectly camouflaged. If the authorities tried to use this fuse, it would be interrupted and the detonators would not go off.
The electrical detonation system was much more complicated. Basically, it was neutralized by an electrical bridge which detoured the current, a sort of short circuit.
Nonetheless, all these measures, assuming they worked according to our plans, would give us only a few minutes, because when the authorities saw that the TNT didn’t explode, that we weren’t flying into the air in pieces, they would try some other way to do away with us. All they would have to do was fire cannons at any of the Circulars, since every one of them was still a powder keg. And so for those few moments left us, our action groups had organized a second-stage plan. They partially cut through some windows so that just a few quick strokes would sever them completely. They also took off the grating, almost a yard square, from one of the entrances to the drains and excavated a tunnel that ran underneath the foundations and came out several yards away from the Circulars, but they didn’t remove the last few inches of dirt at the exit. Many of the TNT sticks were half emptied, and homemade grenades were fabricated with fuses made out of match heads.
Although all the work in our Circular was well conceived, well planned, and well executed, if the men in the Circular next to us didn’t do the same things, nothing would come of it. If one of the huge powder kegs exploded; it would be enough to set off the adjoining ones.
No one could tell whether the work that had been carried out would produce the results we hoped for. There was, however, absolutely no doubt about the authorities’ criminal intentions. After a great deal of effort, we managed to leak the news about what they had planned to the outside world. In Miami, articles were published about the government’s monstrous plans. But all our pleas and the pleas of our families to international organizations, especially the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, were futile. Nobody paid the least attention to the act of barbarism which the Cuban government had laid plans for. There was not a single voice raised in protest.
11
OPERATION REPRISAL
Knowing that we were so to speak, sleeping on a mattress full of explosives destroyed many prisoners’ nerves; some went completely mad. They felt they were trapped, and they gave way to sheer animal panic. On two nights, we were awakened by the blood-curdling shrieks of prisoners who threw themselves over the sixth-floor railing onto the prison yard below. One of them had been in the jail for two years. The other had arrived with the last consignments of prisoners from Oriente Province. I remember that this latter prisoner’s name was Arturo; I had spoken with him several times.
Every time the group of technicians under Lightning’s command went down into the basement, several prisoners would be seized with hysteria.
“They’re down there! They’re sure as hell gonna blow us to smithereens! I hope they don’t connect us up by mistake!”
Dozens of men lived in that state of anxiety. They kept watch on their own (they would hardly sleep), and they practically leaped out of their skin if it grew too quiet outside. They had evolved a grisly interpretation of a too-silent night — guards on post had received orders to evacuate because they were going to set off the TNT.
And in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs failure, not only our psychological state, but living conditions generally in the prison became much more severe. Even food was much scarcer. At that time, they would bring in vats full of greasy water with some vegetables floating in it — potatoes, pumpkins, yams — frequently dirty and rotten, at that. We found out from men working in the kitchen, who belonged to Circular 4, that one hundred pounds of foodstuffs per day were allocated for the six thousand prisoners on Isla de Pinos — that worked out to less than a pound for every fifty prisoners. And that was the extent of our food. The bread had not a drop of fat or lard in it, just salt, and not always that. Its texture was so rubbery that you could stretch it out to more than a third longer without breaking it.
Filth, cockroaches, and rats continually appeared in the food.
The hot sugar water they served as breakfast was prepared with sugar dyed green. The sacks the sugar came in had a notice printed on them: NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION. It was waste sugar, swept up off the factory floors or picked up with shovels, and it was full of trash and impurities. It was meant to be used as cattle feed.
It was during those months that guanina came to Isla de Pinos. The guanina bush, related to the tree called fustic which produces a strong yellow dye and is sometimes slightly toxic, yields a small bean somewhat like a lentil, and about the same color, but it tastes terrible. It has a strong, bitter taste of bile — another of its relatives is called, for good reason, the kidney tree. Campesinos sometimes used it as a substitute for coffee. It, like the green sugar, was ordinarily used for cattle feed, but only when mixed with other grains, since it has hardly any nutritional value of its own. It is not used for human consumption. But that didn’t matter much to the prison authorities.
There was a man named Vivas Bartelemí in our Circular. He had been a medical student who had gone as a member of a diplomatic mission to Communist China, and he had appeared in the newspapers in a photograph shaking hands with Mao Zedong. Somebody started a rumor that he had bought the guanina during his trip to China. Vivas thought that was funny. Knowing his sense of humor, I suspect he himself had something to do with the spread of the rumor. Irony seemed to crop up all around Vivas. He had been fighting against Batista and was taken prisoner during the Revolution. When Castro came to power, Vivas was arrested again and confined to the same Circular he had been in before.
One of the dishes they served us was guanina with cornmeal ground very fine, but still full of worms, and very bitter-tasting. The rice also had worms, and a very unpleasant taste — they didn’t wash it before cooking it. It seemed that any foodstuff that had spoiled was sent to Isla de Pinos, for us to eat. It was about that time that macaroni and spaghetti began appearing constantly; this food became the staple of the Cuban people, as it also did, of course, for the prisoners, for the next twenty years. But you should not imagine a tasty dish of macaroni Italian-style. What they served in the jail was boiled with a little bit of salt until it all stuck together in a gummy paste; that was all. You had to cut it into pieces to serve it, and even to be able to swallow it, you had to add sugar. The sale of cooking oil, spices, and salt that we had taken advantage of before was now suspended. There was no protein whatsoever in our diet. So not only was our food unbearably monotonous and unspeakably foul-tasting, it lacked all vitamins and other elements necessary to the organism as well, and that would have further consequences later on, when the effects of vitamin and protein deficiency were felt by all of us.
One day they called us out in groups of twenty-five to take us to the records office, which had been set up in the back part of Building 5. We went up some steps leading to a large room. They shaved my head, took clippings of hair around my temples, and fingerprinted me several times. They went all over my naked body, looking for tattoos, marks, or scars which might be used to identify me. Then they photographed me and gave me my prisoner number — 26830. From then on, my name would not mean anything to the garrison, and I would be just a number.
We were made to sign a card authorizing the prison to open and read our correspondence. One man refused to sign so the guards were sent for. They beat him until he signed. There was another prisoner, named Mitre, who couldn’t be forced to sign. He was a calm, quiet man, but he had an indestructible will.
Given all these conditions, who could have been surprised when one rainy, stormy night in July, Cheo Guerra, Pedro Carlo Osorio, “El Mexicano,” Edmundo Amado, and two other men decided to escape. They cut through a window on the hospital side of the Circular. The rain was coming down in sheets; the sound of it was deafening and the spotlights were useless, since the curtains of water cut off their light. The men managed to climb down without any trouble, but they got no more than a few yards away. Someone had seen them. An intense burst of fire, muted somewhat by the sound of the rain,