Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
ESCAPE
After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Boitel, Ulises, and I sat down to analyze our situation, and we came to the conclusion that the Revolution would remain in power for many long years. Yet, that view of the matter left us with only one thing to do — try to escape. That idea, that dream, lies in the heart of every prisoner. It’s an idea not all prisoners rise to, not for lack of decision or courage alone, but rather because very specific factors hold them back — their families, the scant possibility of success, and the great possibility of dying. And there are, of course, those prisoners who simply resign themselves to their fate and sit down to await the outcome; those are the majority in every jail in the world.
From the moment we conceived the idea of escaping, our minds were constantly at work on a way to realize the faint dream. Each of us thought about how it ought to come off. There were days of intense consultations; one of us would propose a plan and the others would pick it to pieces. We discarded cutting through the barbed wire in the classical manner, using a pair of strong pliers to cut through the steel, chain-link fence and escaping through the breach. The escape could not involve violence, either, since then the chance of success was substantially reduced. It had to be as simple and easy as possible, so as not to arouse suspicion.
During the planning stage, I was in charge of mapping the surrounding area. I was to locate on a map, as precisely as I could, the roads, elevations, guardposts, and whatever other details might come into play at the time of the escape. Even though from the fifth floor you could see for many miles all around, we managed to find a prisoner who had accompanied Batista’s children when they traveled abroad, a man named Tasi, who we understood had a telescope made right there in the prison from lenses that someone had smuggled in. With the aid of the little telescope, I spent hours both during the day and at night closely observing our surroundings. Little by little, I added new details to the map — the little militia encampments to the northwest and the Cossack guardpost on the other side of the military cordon, among the pines, which could be made out only because of the glow of the cigarettes they lighted at night.
Over and above the physical details, I familiarized myself with the routine and movements of the garrison. The prisoner gatekeeper was authorized to wear a watch, and we persuaded him to lend it to us. It was a tremendous help; with it I could measure how long it would take a soldier to go from the little guardhouse to the last guard hut which could be seen, or to a house just beyond the fence to the east, beyond the little stand of pines, where another guard hut was tucked away. It was at this house that the guards’ uniforms were washed and ironed. You could almost always see long clotheslines with olive-green uniforms flapping in the wind. The house became very important, since it gave us a plausible way to escape from the prison.
The preparations for an escape generate a tremendous amount of activity. A thousand details have to be taken care of, each one of vital importance in its own right. Another of the common prisoners who sometimes collaborated with us gave us invaluable help. We got in touch with him because we needed contacts on the outside, friends and relatives of Boitel and Ulises who could furnish certain articles we needed. You needed some luck, too, and some came our way. While our planning was going on, the Director-General of Jails and Prisons, in an act of “generosity,” decided to permit us two visits a year, one in June and one in September. That was a real piece of news for the presidio, but for us, and our escape plans, it was a blessing.
Pieces of information we would need were fed to us by some of the common prisoners. Boitel was the one who took charge of those contacts. I was in charge of vigilance and other details, as I’ve mentioned. I’ll speak about Ulises’ responsiblities in a moment. There was a fourth man, Benjamín Brito, who would go with us as our guide and navigator. Brito was a sailor, an expert in everything connected with the sea, and he was doubly valuable because he knew the swamps of the Island. He had been a caiman hunter in that area for years. Besides Brito’s knowledge of the Island, we were fortunate to have, from the common prisoners, a detailed map of Isla de Pinos with topographical and elevation isobars, rivers, and creeks marked on it, and also indicating the swampy regions.
Measuring time with the watch and counting the guards’ steps, I put together a table of distances and times between one point and another — as for example from one guardpost to the main guardhouse, from the guardhouse to our Circular, and so on. The hours of the changing of the guards were also very important, since if an escape was to be attempted a short while after the guard had come on duty, it ran the risk of being stymied because the relief would be wide awake and watchful. Quite the contrary if the escape took place toward the end of a shift when the guard was tired and ready to go in — his watch-fulness then would not be so sharp, he would pay less attention. The only thing he would be thinking about would be his replacement.
I knew that between the little guard huts there was a distance of about fifty yards, so guiding myself by this fact, I observed several soldiers to get an average time for a fifty-yard walk. Then, once that number was known, I could estimate other times for known distances, and other distances from known times. I rechecked my calculations — for time and distance from the main guardhouse to the house where the clothes were washed, for example — both by the time a guard actually took and by the fact that I knew the distance between one point and the other was approximately four hundred yards.
The barbed-wire fences had a watch it would be fatal to take lightly. Every fifty yards, there was a guard hut, equipped with spotlights, with an armed sentinel stationed inside. The two endmost guard huts, at the front and the back of the prison, were taller and armed with machine guns. The chain-link fences had been restored in 1960. They were erected on deep concrete foundations, which had trenches dug in front of them; the fences were topped with metal Vs which carried ten or twelve barbed-wire strands. After six o’clock in the evening, a guard jeep made uninterrupted patrols outside the presidio, traveling always parallel to the barbed wire, as another one did the same inside.
We decided to escape dressed as militiamen. The decision was virtually inevitable for several reasons: they were the ones constantly going in and out of the presidio; there were several militia encampments in the surrounding area; and it would be much easier to get lost among them than among the soldiers from the regular garrison. The militia uniform we would need consisted of a pair of olive-green pants, a blue shirt, a black beret, a military web belt, also olive-green, and black boots. Ulises was put in charge of the uniforms.
We needed militia shirts and berets above all. The khaki-colored pants from the old army were the uniforms we always wore, and it was easy enough to dye them olive-green. Many of those pants, from having been constantly worn and washed, had lost the letter P that had been stenciled on them. The military belts were part of the prisoners’ uniforms anyway, and we already had the boots. We also needed hacksaw blades to cut through the bars, Cuban and American money, a first-aid kit, knives, water-purifying tablets, and a whole list of other little things.
While I was gathering my information, we got two lenses for a more powerful telescope. We made the tube out of cardboard pasted together with glue made from macaroni. We dyed the tube inside with soot and smoke given off by burning kerosene we got sometimes to kill bedbugs with. The telescope was made so you could take it apart, and I always took the precaution of not leaving it assembled if I wasn’t using it. Hiding the lenses was very easy — when we were finished using them, we simply dropped them into a pail of water. Even if there was a search, however much they looked the guards couldn’t find them.
At last the day of the visit was upon us. Twelve hundred prisoners were to receive family members at the same time and in the same place, in the corral a hundred yards square with its high barbed-wire fence. In 1960, General Headquarters had permitted one visit, but this new visit really was unprecedented because of the number of inmates and family members who would come together.
The eve of the visit made me aware of some startling ways veteran prisoners prepared to meet their families. I heard one of our neighbors in an adjoining cell say he had to iron his uniform for the visit. I did a double-take — there were no irons there, or even electricity, nothing of the kind. I asked him how he proposed to iron his clothes under those conditions, and he smiled at me and said he’d show me — a friend of his was already doing the ironing up on the fourth floor.