Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
and the guards had verified that no one had escaped. Children shouted to their fathers — “Adios papá!”
One of them, clinging to his father’s neck, crying inconsolably, was begging him not to stay there, to go back home with him. The pathetic scene was interrupted by the guards who invaded the corral to hurry the straggling family members along. They goaded them with cries of “Move along. Outside. It’s over. Out. Outside, now.”
When they had all left the corral, the guards counted us, and at our return to the Circular they stripped us again. At first most of the prisoners seemed sad and nostalgic; we were downcast. However, once inside, we joined our friends to talk over the visit, family gossip, politics, rumors.
We four would-be escapees were elated at our success in smuggling out the notes during the visit, but for some prisoners the visit had only brought on terrible, anguished depression. Cuco Muñiz and I, each with a foot propped up and leaning on the first-floor railing in front of cell 35, were chatting about the latest news we had learned during the visit and about the situation in the prisons on the Island. Suddenly from above, something bulky dropped in front of us — very close, because we were leaning out a little. It landed on the ground in the prison yard with a heavy sodden crunching sound. I will never forget the sound made by the man’s head as it burst against the ground. The man fell face down almost directly in front of the washbasins with his face turned aside and one leg drawn up. The mass of his brains was seeping out through his nose. Jesús López Cuevas had committed suicide by jumping off the fourth floor. I stood with my eyes fixed on that poor man’s body lying before me, nine feet below.
Some rebels captured in the mountains of Escambray lived in Circular 4. One afternoon shortly after the visit they were called to trial. The tribunal was assembled from militiamen and soldiers of the presidio; it sat in a little garrison theater. All four of the rebel campesinos were sentenced to death. They were transported in a dump truck with their hands handcuffed behind them, under heavy guard, to the foothills of Escambray, the rebel zone, in the province of Las Villas. Another prisoner was being carried in a military jeep separate from the others. He was also handcuffed.
Two of the prisoners in the dump truck, Aquilino Cerquera and Macario Quintana, were taken out of it and executed in the town square of their hometown, the city of Trinidad, so as to inspire terror in the other inhabitants of the region. The truck then went on toward La Campana, and the trip continued over highways curving up into the mountains. The truck stopped, the guards got out and surrounded it, and they began to fire their machine guns and rifles into the two handcuffed men. It was simple butchery. That spectacle unfolded before the horrified eyes of the prisoner traveling in the jeep, Cristóbal Airado. He was the only survivor. After the machine-gunning, the soldiers engaged the dump-truck mehanism and the bodies rolled out of the back of it to the ground. One of the officers said to Cristóbal, “This is so you’ll know what we do with people who oppose the Revolution.”
They had taken Cristóbal along so he could tell others what had happened. The Communists knew that soon the event would be common knowledge throughout Cuba, and the people themselves would spread the message of terror.
We, of course, soon found out about this latest act of barbarism. The growing intimidation and repression, not only in the prison but throughout the Island as well, led us to think that if we failed in our attempt to escape the consequence would be death, but we went on with our preparations. We had given our relatives instructions to send certain sums of money to an address which our contact, the common prisoner that was helping us, had given us. We had also asked them to send ID photographs. Two weeks after the visit, our friend delivered to us, using the string-through-the-window method we had perfected, four gorgeous militia ID cards with our photos. It was professional work. According to those documents, each of us belonged to one of the militia companies camped near the presidio. And the names on the ID cards were not invented, they actually existed. I was called Braulio Barceló and I belonged to the 830th Battalion, quartered at Los Mangos, a nearby camp. I could have been arrested somewhere on the island, but if they called up my battalion and asked about the man whose name appeared on the ID card, they would be told that indeed that militiaman belonged to that military unit.
A friend very skilled at making knives cut up the blade of a machete to make us four excellent ones with wooden handles. Step by step, we were getting together the necessary provisions and equipment. For example, in a little plastic pouch sewn inside a larger plastic bag filled with gofio de trigo, we hid Halazone tablets for purifying water.
I was still making observations of the area with the telescope. I finally even came to recognize the faces of the soldiers in the little guard huts and the ones posted in front of the main guardhouse; I could see their faces as clearly as though they were only an arm’s length away.
Around the middle of August, a thick mattress arrived for Boitel. In Cuba, mattresses are filled with raw cotton stuffing and sewn with a piping about an inch in diameter all around the top and bottom. The guards had slashed this one, as they always did, from head to foot to poke around in the raw cotton padding in search of objects or letters hidden inside and smuggled in. Then they had folded up the mattress with the cut inside so the filling wouldn’t come out, and tied it up with a piece of twine. It was a harmless-looking mattress, apparently thoroughly searched. But inside its piping were packed four militia shirts. They had been stretched out, twisted into tight spirals, and wrapped and braided with strong thread. They had then been padded with a thin layer of cotton inside the piping, two shirts on top and two underneath. Carmen Jiménez, Boitel’s girlfriend, had come to Isla de Pinos for the express purpose of observing the searches performed on mattresses. Since the inspection of the articles was carried out in the presence of the family members, so they could be held responsible immediately if they tried to smuggle in some forbidden item, three or four inspections were conducted before her eyes. What she saw was that there was only one place they didn’t search — that thick piping around the mattress. With this information, she left for Havana, and some friends made up the mattress at home. She brought it to the prison herself. If they had caught her, Carmen would have wound up in jail.
The berets had come in the same way the shirts had. The hacksaw blades had also, though we didn’t find them immediately. We were lucky, because that was the last time they allowed mattresses to be brought in. Now all we needed to do was dye the pants and the web belts.
We began workouts to get into shape; we walked to build up our stamina. Every day we walked the circumference of the Circular dozens of times, and also up and down — from the fifth floor to the first floor and from the first floor back up again. And every day we added two or three laps and built up speed. There were many prisoners who did this for exercise, so we didn’t arouse any suspicions. We calculated that finally we were walking fifteen miles a day. We took turns on lookout — when I walked, Ulises watched, and vice versa.
One detail which might have aroused attention once we were outside was how pale we were; we hadn’t had any sun during all the months of our incarceration. We needed to get a little better color, such as the militiamen had. That was indeed a complicated undertaking. We had to follow the sun from one cell window to another to expose our faces to the shifting sun as it came in between the bars. We were managing to get a little tan.
All this took time, but a prisoner learns patience — and things were coming together well.
14
“SQUARES”: THE POLITICAL REHABILITATION PROGRAM
The morning the Major told us that the penal authorities were going to authorize books and newspapers to be brought in, a general murmur and exclamations of surprise stopped him. He called for silence and went on. Every inmate would be allowed three books per month, but they had to come from the National Press of Cuba. Foreign books would not be allowed, nor would Cuban books from other publishers. Magazines and books printed in socialist countries and their national newspapers would be allowed, but nothing from the free presses of the world.
Two weeks later, a truck full of books and magazines pulled up in front of the Circular. They had all been printed by the National Press. Among them there were