Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
arrived, I saw how they went about it. The iron was an aluminum canteen cup to which they’d nailed a heavy wooden handle. They put plastic bags inside, all rolled up and knotted, and set them afire. This produced high temperatures in the canteen cup, which they ran over the clothing to iron it. Through a long, laborious process, they also extracted starch from macaroni. Some men ironed with bottles full of hot water. The efforts of these men was admirable, but I told myself that if that was the way to go elegantly dressed to the visit, I without a doubt would never be able to manage it. I contented myself with putting my pants carefully on top of the canvas of the cot and then some blankets on top of that, and sleeping on the pile. This method of “ironing” was the most popular among the prisoners.
Many people’s nerves had a profound effect on their digestive system, so it seemed there were never enough bathrooms just before a visit. There were many people who did not ordinarily have stomach or digestive problems but had them unfailingly the day before a visit.
Boitel, Ulises, and I had made up three minuscule notes, all three identical, to try to get at least one of them through the search. In the note we asked Boitel’s outside contacts to send us the things we needed for the escape and explained how to get them to us. We also asked them to make arrangements for a boat to pick us up on the coast at a certain place, day, and hour. We could confirm this last on the next visit. And we asked for an answer. The notes were in code; we were to furnish the key aloud to the person we gave the notes to. The key was a single word of five letters — it was unforgettable, since it was the last name of the Maestro, the Apostle of Cuban Independence: Martí.3
The main city of Isla de Pinos, Nueva Gerona, is located several miles from the prison. A road running from the town crosses the Las Casas River and comes right to the door of the prison. The hotel capacity of Nueva Gerona and its environs was very limited; there were two little hotels and several small guest houses. But some four thousand visitors had arrived for that visit in June. They slept in parks, in doorways, right in the middle of the street. Beginning the afternoon of the day before the visit, they came to the gates of the prison and formed enormously long lines, carrying the little packages of food they had been authorized to bring. They waited there through the night.
Starting early in the morning, we were up out of bed, standing in lines for the latrines, shaving, getting everything ready. We went over our clothes carefully, looking for bedbugs and lice so we could get them out of the clothes. These disgusting creatures were an ineradicable plague. There were millions of them. That entire gigantic building, all six floors of it, was full of bedbugs. We struggled against them constantly, but they hid in the most unexpected places — the soles of shoes, belt buckles, the seams of clothing. The walls of many cells had lost their cement outer layer, and the bricks underneath had holes full of these tiny little bugs. But in truth not everyone tried to exterminate them. It didn’t matter very much to some men. They would fall exhausted onto their cots, and although throngs of the insects began to suck their blood, the men didn’t even wake up. When the bedbugs were full, they moved very sluggishly, so the prisoner, dead asleep, would turn over in bed, squash them, and the next day the canvas covering of the cot would be covered with bloodstains. The blood sucked out by bedbugs gives off a characteristic piercing, sickening odor. On some walls, you could see a dark stain about the size of an egg. If you touched it, it would disperse in all directions. It would be a colony of thousands of bedbugs.
To combat them, there were two preferred methods — there was kerosene, which was especially difficult to get hold of, or there was washing the cot with a brush, scrubbing the seams of the covering. The cots with burlap were a trial for the prisoners and a real paradise for the bedbugs, which were camouflaged by the dark fabric; since they were so tiny it was almost impossible to make them out. When a solution of water and detergent was applied to them, they died immediately in that characteristic way of theirs — they stiffen, then arch their bodies, and then they quiver and die. But getting detergent was not easy either. Instead, after washing the cot, you could rub a piece of soap back and forth over the seams, coating them with a paste of the soap. The bedbugs hated the smell of the soap we used. Therefore some prisoners, when the guards were about to make a sweep of the cells, would lay down a barrier of soap around their cells by rubbing the bar across the floor. That way bedbugs from adjoining cells would not cross the “magic circle” and invade their own. Old campesinos used still another method — they put stems or veins of tobacco leaves down, since the odor of tobacco also drove the bedbugs off. There were men who kept some sense of black humor, and they would say it made them sad to kill the bedbugs because they were blood of their blood.
Appeals to the prison authorities to fumigate the cells bore no fruit for the almost ten years I was there, so that on top of all the other sufferings we had to go through was that plague. The bedbug bites were terrible for me, since I was allergic to their bites; they formed large welts which lasted for days.
At seven o’clock in the morning, the platoon of guards that would search us before we went out to the visit finally arrived at the front gate. The gatekeeper told all the inmates to start getting ready because in a few minutes the guards would start calling off men from the lists.
The first prisoners were going out. They had to strip completely. The guards then carefully went over the men’s clothing seam by seam, the cuffs of their pants, the double seams of their flies. They stuck their hands into their shoes, looking for notes. They did the same with their socks. They orderd the men to raise their arms and checked their armpits. When the search was over, the prisoners dressed again and went out toward the corral. Six or eight guards were posted all along the walk, but this time the prisoners didn’t run in terror.
Ulises, Boitel, and I crowded together next to the bars at the exit to see how the others were searched. If they did a search on me like the ones I was watching, I would have no problem. When my turn came, I was nervous, but the hidden note was very difficult to find. I had packed it flat so there was hardly any bulge, into a heat-sealed plastic protector. Ulises was searched at the same time I was. Since we were being called out in alphabetical order, not by prisoner number, Boitel had been one of the first ones through, and he hadn’t had any problem. When the guard turned my clothes over to me, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. The search had been thorough, but not sufficient. The notes had gotten through, taped under our testicles.
13
THE VISIT, ITS AFTERMATH, AND CONTINUING PLANS
When all of us were in the corral, guards armed with rifles were stationed at all four corners outside. We all looked toward the walk down which our relatives would come; since the night before they had been waiting in the open in front of the prison, lying on the shoulders of the road, under trees, and forced to perform their bodily functions among the shrubs which grew alongside the road. At last the throng of family members came into view. A soldier was leading the march; he was walking a few yards ahead to keep anyone from rushing forward. The visitors were anxious to arrive, almost desperate, but he didn’t allow anyone to get too close to him; they had to stay far back. Five or six times he stopped dead and turned and gestured and shouted at them, and the human mass behind him also had to stop. We couldn’t hear what he was saying to them, since they were still too far away.
As they neared, the guards opened the gate and we bunched together, waiting for our families. Men who had already made out relatives in the crowd shouted and waved their arms. When they came in at last, there were moving, pathetic, dramatic scenes as women and children cried and hugged prisoners they had come perhaps hundreds of miles to see. My mother and sister arrived among the first groups, but my father waited outside. Men were forbidden to come into the corral; they had to stay outside the fence.
The visit took place under the most uncomfortable circumstances. We had to stand or squat on the ground, under an implacable sun — which in the month of June, in the tropics, is truly exhausting. There was no water. Children were complaining of thirst. Adults stoically tried to bear up under that long exposure to the scorching sun, but some visitors fainted.
The visit ended at three o’clock in the afternoon, and by then elderly ladies, especially, were ready to drop from so many hours in the sun, but the families could not leave immediately.