Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
were given a brutal beating. The soldiers, blind with rage, couldn’t even wait to get them to the punishment cages, where they were to spend many months. That was Cheo’s second visit to the dungeonlike cells, and it would not be his last.
The next morning, Lieutenant Julio Tarrau, the prison director, came in at the head of the garrison. Wielding his Russian Makarov pistol, which no one had ever seen him shoot but which he thought gave him more authority, and which certainly gave him more courage, he screamed at us, “I’ll kill any son of a bitch that moves. Stand in front of your cells, at attention!”
The garrison, which amounted to some two hundred soldiers for that search, filled the prison yard. The first wave entered without firearms, carrying only bayonets and truncheons. Behind them came the guards armed with rifles and fixed bayonets.
“Okay!” Tarrau began speaking again. “Everybody strip! Everybody take off your clothes and stand there in front of your cells!”
Carrión and I stripped. In the next cell, ex-Captain Tápanes-Tápanes, from the city of Cárdenas, and his celImate Chávez followed suit.
There was someone on the fourth floor who did not take off his underwear. Lieutenant Tarrau screamed at him to come downstairs. The atmosphere grew even more tense, more frightened and expectant. Thousands of eyes were fixed on that man slowly walking down the stairs. In everyone’s mind was the same question — and it was almost like a plea there was no longer enough time for: Why didn’t you take off your underwear like everybody else?
When the man came to the prison yard, Tarrau himself shoved him, and a group of guards fell on him. The prisoner struggled, but only, for a few seconds. The hail of blows flattened him, and staggering, almost unable to walk, he was dragged and shoved out toward the punishment cells, while they ripped his underwear from him in shreds. He had not even reached the main gate before he was naked.
A murmur of protest and indignation arose throughout the Circular. Tarrau shot his pistol into the air, and the guards cocked their rifles. You could hear the bolts of the machine guns click too, as the guards in the tower cocked them and took aim at the prisoners before the cells. The rifles’ power of persuasion silenced us. We learned later that the prisoner hadn’t wanted to take off his underwear because when he was fighting in the mountains with Castro’s troops an enemy mine had torn off his member and destroyed one testicle.
The spectacle in the Circular beggared description. All you could do at the moment was stare — there were hundreds of completely naked men formed into a surrealistic legion, standing at attention in perfect formation.
“First floor, down here!” Tarrau was the only one giving orders. He was livid with rage. He was the director, and these prisoners had tried to escape on him.
We began to descend, and he ordered us to stand in front of the wall next to the washbasins. Some of us were randomly clubbed and pushed. When we were all downstairs, the garrison went up into the cells. Five or six hours later, we were still standing there; several older men’s ankles and legs were swollen and inflamed. No one was allowed to raise his head, under threat of being beaten and dragged off to the punishment cages. Some of those who couldn’t resist the temptation to look up to watch the destruction of our possessions were caught at it and brutally beaten and then spent months naked in the punishment pavilion.
When the soldiers were finally finished with their work and the bars of the main gate closed behind the last guard, we were released from our formation. In the prison yard, in front of the showers and washbasins, there were piles of clothing from all the cells on all the floors. Several inmates later took charge of sorting the clothing and calling out the owners’ numbers. We headed back to our cells. More than a thousand naked prisoners filled the stairways. We were all eager to be the first to arrive, less to see what the guards had done than to cover ourselves....
There is nothing more humiliating or more degrading than forced nakedness before your oppressors — you feel especially vulnerable. The authorities knew that, and they used our nakedness against us, another in their arsenal of psychological weapons. The interrogators from the Political Police never failed to keep prisoners, both men and women, naked. They took the women in naked for interrogations by groups of officers. If for a man it’s embarrassing to be forced to stand there completely stripped before a phalanx of interrogators, for a woman it is much more terrible, and many of the suicides and attempted suicides among the women were triggered precisely by that humiliation. Even today the government still employs this practice with women political prisoners. When they are confined to solitary they are completely undressed and then officers from the jail, Prison Headquarters, and the Political Police stop by to see them.
We arrived at our cells. On the floor, all jumbled together and scattered, were the few things we owned — underwear, socks, uniforms, and our pillows. Over the heap they had poured the little gofio de trigo and sugar we had left, our only reserve of real nutrition, which we very carefully doled out so as to keep down our hunger a little. Then, on top of all that, they had poured out the water from the pails.
Dozens of cots had been slashed by bayonets, and in some cells they had mixed salt and washing detergent into the food.
This had been the reprisal operation which never failed to follow an escape or escape attempt. “Those who remain will pay for the desires for freedom of those who try to get away” — that was the unmistakable message the authorities were sending us, and the Communists made sure the message sank in: The prisoner who tries to escape has no sense of esprit de corps or comradeship; he is an egotist who thinks only about making his own lot better, a man who cares nothing about those he leaves behind; he simply abandons them to their fate. Sadly, there was always someone who at least half believed those sophistries.
It was after Cheo and El Mexicano’s escape attempt that the authorities began assigning soldiers with dogs to walk guard all around the Circulars. Our guard came on duty at six o’clock in the evening, his rifle on his shoulder, and he walked by looking at all the windows. Whenever he and the guard who was on patrol at Circular 3 crossed paths they stopped, chatted for a few minutes, and took up their rounds again. They must have been bored senseless by their rounds but that habit of talking to each other when they met would be quite helpful to us in the future.
Our cell on the second floor was the place a group of friends, almost all students, would get together. We would have interesting conversations there, which would take our minds off the reality of bolts and bars for a time. Often someone would recite poetry, Villanueva would sing his latest songs to us, or we would laugh at one of Díaz Lanz’s imitations.
Transports of prisoners from various prisons in Cuba would frequently arrive. In one of the transports, Benito López came in from La Cabaña. He was a businessman arrested only because he had spoken out against Communism. His refusal to join the mass demonstrations and his open expression of disappointment with the Revolution’s course were enough for the chairman of the CDR to denounce him to the Political Police. One of the “terrible” accusations they brought against him was that he had sent his son, Rubén, to the United States.
Benito came to our floor. He seemed completely disoriented, lost, and miserable. His sadness struck me, and I tried to cheer him up. He had been assigned to Celestino Méndez’s cell, near mine, but there were no beds left in the cell, so he had to sleep on the floor. Besides the discomfort, he had to get up very early to get out of the other men’s way. So I told him he could come into my cell during the day and rest and sleep on my cot. Our friendship began just that casually; neither of us could imagine that one day we would be relatives. I don’t know how he had managed to keep some tiny photos of his children. His youngest daughter, Martha, was a girl with little round glasses, and even when I first saw her face to face, I saw nothing special about her.
Benito’s family was almost an obsession with him, and he never stopped talking about them. To raise his spirits a little, there was a phrase I often repeated — “We’re out on the streets!” — and the two of us would joke about that pet phrase of ours, which became a sort of sign of our optimism, our common dream.
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