Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
eyes flew open. The cold muzzle of a machine gun held to my temple had shocked me awake. I was confused and frightened. Three armed men were standing around my bed, and one of them was shoving my head into the pillow with his machine gun.
“Where’s the pistol?”
As the man with the machine gun kept my head immobile, another slid his hand under it to check for that purely imaginary pistol I was supposed to be armed with. Then the oldest of them, a thin man with graying hair, spoke to me again. He brusquely told me to get dressed; I had to go with them.
These were agents of Castro’s Political Police. I was to learn later that the older man, the one doing the talking, had been an agent in the Batista regime as well. There was a fourth agent in the living room keeping watch on my mother and sister.
I hadn’t heard them come in. When they knocked at the front door, it was my mother who had opened it. I was in a deep sleep in the last bedroom down the hall, with blankets piled on me to keep out the cold.
The three agents made me get dressed in front of them. I reached to open the closet, but one of them cut me off. He opened the door himself and slid the hangers to one side, one by one, and then he gave a quick glance around at the rest of the things in the closet. I began to dress, while they stood around me and watched carefully. But they seemed more relaxed now, less nervous. When these agents are sent out to detain some citizen, they are not told who he is or why he is being arrested. They are told, though, as a matter of course, that he is armed and extremely dangerous. Now they knew that I wasn’t armed and I didn’t seem particularly dangerous; in fact, I never had been either.
When I got my clothes on, they began the search of the house. The search was thorough, painstaking, long. They spent almost four hours going through everything. There was not one inch of the house they didn’t go over with a fine-tooth comb. They opened jars and bottles, went through books page by page, emptied toothpaste tubes, and looked at the motor of the refrigerator, at the mattresses.
I tried to reassure my mother and sister. I told them this had to be some sort of mistake, since I hadn’t done anything that warranted my being arrested. I kept up a conversation with my mother, who was terribly nervous and upset by this middle-of-the-night violation of the peace of our home, but as we spoke I tried to think who might have reported that I had weapons. It seemed obvious to me that it must have been someone who wanted to see me detained for a while, see me harassed on some trumped-up charge. Of course, sooner or later it would all be straightened out. I figured the denunciation must have come from someone in my office.
At that time, I had a good job in the Caja Postal de Ahorros, which might be termed the Postal Savings Bank, an office attached to the Ministry of Communications in the Revolutionary Government. I had received several promotions, thanks largely to the fact that I was a university student. Some of the people I worked with there, I knew, were out to get me.
A few weeks before, one of the directors, a man I had developed a close friendship with, called me in to warn me that the Political Police had been around asking questions about me. I had had some friction in the office because I had frequently spoken out against Communism as a political system because it went against my religious beliefs and some of my more idealistic notions of the world.
In those days, several things had happened which could be seen as signaling the radicalization of the internal structure of the Ministry of Communications. The Minister, Enrique Oltuski, a professional engineer, had been removed from office and replaced by Raúl Curbelo, who had fought with Castro in the anti-Batista guerrillas. The only thing Curbelo knew anything about was cows; he told me so himself a few days after he had been appointed, when he came around to introduce himself in my department.
“Listen, Valladares, I don’t know anything about any of this. I was in the Agrarian Reform Institute, but Fidel sent me here to take charge of this Ministry. The only thing I know anything about is cows, so I’m counting on all of you, to pitch in and help me make this work.”
And he wasn’t kidding. The only thing he knew anything about was cows, but he was a man Castro could trust.
The subdirector of the Postal Savings Bank was replaced by another Communist, as was the treasurer, by an old Party militant from Camagüey Province. That was when they fired one of my best friends and co-workers, Israel Abreu, because of his anti-Marxist statements. Israel had been a member of the underground groups struggling against Batista’s dictatorship, so the new Minister’s decision to fire him caused a great deal of discontent among all of us. I personally spoke out against the measure. I called it an abuse of authority and a violation of freedom of expression, which had been one of the basic tenets for which Castro’s revolution had supposedly been fought.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that I had been marked as an anti-Communist. One of my last outbursts was brought on by a slogan that was being spread throughout the country by the government propaganda apparatus. By that time Castro was accused of being a Communist, so they circulated the slogan, “If Fidel is a Communist, then put me on the list. He’s got the right idea.” This slogan was printed on decals and bumper stickers and on little tin plaques to be displayed on the doors of private homes; it was published daily in the newspapers; it was blazoned on posters pasted up on the walls of schools, police stations, factories, shops, and government offices. The purpose of all this was quite clear and simple: Castro was presented to the country as a messiah, a savior, the man who would return the country to freedom, prosperity, happiness. Castro could never be linked to anything evil, to anything bad at all. Whatever Castro was, or might be, was good by definition. Therefore, if he was a Communist, then put me on the list.
That was the kind of reasoning the propaganda specialists of the Party had used. The great majority of the Cuban people didn’t know much about Communism. They weren’t really politically aware, and it was difficult for them to believe the bad things people were saying about Marxism. The Party was using the slogan to prepare the masses, gradually getting them used to the idea of a Communist government.
The Communists in the Ministry came in one day to set a card with that slogan on my worktable. I refused to let them. They were surprised and a little perplexed, because even though they knew I was opposed to Marxism, they thought I wouldn’t reject the card, the slogan, since that would be tantamount to rejecting Fidel. They asked me if I had anything against Castro. I answered that if he was a Communist I did. And that I wouldn’t be on that list. That set off an argument.
Every day I felt more and more out of place, more and more conspicuous. And I was very naïve — I had assumed that the worst they would do to me would be to fire me from my job, as they had Israel. It never occurred to me they would do anything more drastic; it never occurred to me that because I expressed my opinions, because I spoke out against Marxism, they would drag me off to jail. Moreover, the government still hadn’t declared itself Marxist. Castro would do that only some months later.
Within the ranks of the revolutionaries who had fought against Batista, there were thousands of people who would not allow themselves to think that Castro was a Communist. They admitted that it was true that Communists were gradually moving into certain areas, that dreadful things were happening, but it was all behind Fidel’s back. When he found out about it, he’d put a stop to it. How naïve they were! I understood their dilemma, many of them seemed almost willfully unable to come to grips with the fact that Castro had tricked them, used them, gotten them to fight, manipulated them for his own ends. They held to their beliefs by arguing from declarations Castro had made at the very beginning of the Revolution, the statements he had made in Cuba, in Latin American countries, before leaders of the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States, and in numerous press conferences. He had held one press conference on April 17,1959, in Washington, D.C., where he had been invited to speak before the Newspaper Editors’ Association at a meeting in the Statler-Hilton Hotel. There he stated, “I have said that we are not Communists.”
That same day, Charles Porter, congressman from Oregon, pointedly asked Castro if his brother Raúl was indoctrinating the soldiers in Communism, to which the Leader of the Revolution, “indignant,” responded, “Do you really believe that I would permit the Communists to destroy the army that I have built?”
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