Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
entered the galeras, completely naked, they took our jewelry. The officers shouted, egging on the pillaging by the soldiers, “Let’s go! You people have to contribute to buying weapons and airplanes just like everybody else!” If one of us dared not to turn over a piece of jewelry he was beaten even worse.
All the jewelry was dumped into a canvas bag. When we returned to the galeras, there was a huge mess of clothing and personal articles strewn down the passageway. Now that we were safe, out of reach of the guards, the prisoners began to rage against them, accusing them of being thieves and robbers. When I picked up my shoes under the cot, I was amazed to find my watch, which had escaped the search. What should I do now? Suddenly I was frightened, frightened to have in my possession my own watch. What if the garrison troops saw it and jumped to the conclusion I’d hidden it from them? They might feel I had intentionally mocked or tricked them, even defied them. Good Lord, what to do? I stood there dazed and bewildered, holding the watch, while some of the prisoners around me looked at it incredulously and asked, “How did you manage to sneak that one by?”
I was now paralyzed with worry. I would have to hide the watch as though I had stolen it. I toyed with the idea of going to the door, calling the guard over, and very politely turning it over to him. I would explain what had happened. That way I would avoid reprisals, but that seemed a weak and even cowardly thing to do. I decided not to do that, and I think that somehow that decision was what determined all my future conduct. I would always act according to my own set of values, because reprisals would be more bearable than the reproaches and censures of my own conscience.
Every morning at sunrise La Cabaña awoke to the same question — “Who will they shoot today?”
After the morning headcount, they opened the cells and we congregated in the prison yard and waited in the interminable line for breakfast. The youngest member of our particular group was Carlos Alberto, who was underage, although he was taller than any of us. Carlos Alberto had married very young, and his wife, Linda, had brought their daughter, Gina, to the last visit, when she was only a few months old. Carlos and I had made our attempt to escape from the jail at Political Police Headquarters, so the possibility, or rather virtual certainty, of our being executed always hung over our heads. Because of that and because of his age, Carlos Alberto’s family had requested that he be transferred to a jail for minors.
A few days after his trial, he was called to the main gate with his belongings. He was being sent to a prison outside Havana. Within a few weeks, somehow supplied with a hacksaw, he cut through the bars of his cell and escaped. He managed to enter the Venezuelan embassy, and after months of pressure the Cuban government allowed him to leave the country.
Carrión, Piñango, Boitel, and I were jubilant at Carlos Alberto’s escape — one man fewer in that hell! When days before I had thought of Linda and the months-old baby girl, I couldn’t help being overwhelmed by grief for them. I remembered Juan José and Pedrito, and I thought about their little children, whom I had played with during the visit, and whom a week afterward had been left fatherless. Gina, at least, would not be an orphan.
The authorities did not bother to notify the families of the men they had executed, so that quite often the mothers, wives, and children of executed men appeared at visiting time asking to see them. A wrenching silence would fall. The prisoners would look at one another, as though saying, “You tell them.” Sometimes the family interpreted that silence perfectly, and they would open their eyes wide in pain and shock and break into tears.
When Julio Antonio Yebra’s mother found out about her son’s execution, she exclaimed with extraordinary self-possession and integrity, “If the death of my son were the last blood shed by these firing squads, I would accept his death without another word.”
But he would not be the last. Thousands and thousands more would follow Julio Antonio.
4
THE TRIAL
Less than two weeks after my detention I was taken to trial. It was a cold morning, so I borrowed a sweater from Manolito Villanueva. As I went out the front gate, my guards handcuffed me and two soldiers armed with Czech submachine guns stepped in to flank me. The gusty north wind whirled pieces of paper around my feet.
“March!”
And we began to march. The road that begins outside the gate is made of slate paving stones brought from Spain during the colonial period and laid by Negro slaves. The soldiers’ boots were heavy on those blocks worn down by two centuries of iniquity. A slow drizzle started to fall. As we crossed the moats and left the prison behind, I turned my head and gazed at the old lichen-covered walls and the bars of the galeras. To my left, I saw the firing-squad post, a rough wooden stake, and behind it a wall of sandbags, some with holes made by the bullets as they passed completely through the bodies. At the foot of the stake were bloodstains and a few hens pecking around, probably at the remains of the brains of a man executed last night.
We came to the last guardpost after crossing through a promenade of leafy laurel trees, and then we entered the wide cleared area where platoons of guards paraded. In one of the old officers’ quarters buildings, the revolutionary tribunals sat. We went in, and I was motioned into a little room to the right, which was furnished only with two green couches and a Coca-Cola machine. Later, two women dressed in prison garb were also ushered in. Zoila was one of them; the other, whom I had never laid eyes on before, was Inés María, a nurse they had detained when she helped Oliver Obregón reach the mountains of Escambray to join the alzados, a group of anti-Castro guerrillas. We were to be tried as a group. Originally, the Political Police had planned to bring the same charge against everyone detained that early morning of December 28, 1960, but later they changed their mind and grouped us under five different charges.
Obregón was also tried in our group.
Then two other prisoners were brought in to be tried as well. These were the Bayolo brothers, two campesinos, poor countryfolk, accused of having made off with dynamite sticks from the quarries near their hometown. The Bayolos didn’t have a defense attorney; they hadn’t been allowed to make contact with anyone. I promised them that if my lawyer came I’d speak to him about representing them — but what could he do? How could he help them? He didn’t even know anything about the case, so how could he possibly organize a criminal defense for men that he would see for the first time only minutes before their trial? The lawyer I was waiting for didn’t come until later, though, when the Bayolo brothers had already been sentenced to death and carried out of the courtroom.
After about an hour, they decided that our trial would not be held in that building, but in another one, the Officers’ Club. We got up to leave as the trial of three telephone company employees was coming to a close. The only one whose life was spared was Armando Rodríguez Vizcaíno; the other two were executed the next morning. The pregnant wife of one of them cried inconsolably when the sentence was handed down. That was the last scene I saw as I left the improvised courtroom.
Thirteen days had passed since the morning I had been taken from my home and carried to the Ministry to be asked a few questions. In that short time, the Political Police had prepared the whole case. Of course, in twelve or thirteen days it was physically impossible to conduct an investigation, but that’s the way the trials were. I was not allowed to talk privately with the lawyer defending me nor did they allow him access to the list of charges.
In the second courtroom, we found a wooden platform with a long table set up on it. At the table, the members of the tribunal were sitting, talking among themselves, laughing, and smoking cigars, which they held on one side of their mouths, chomping on them in Pancho Villa style. They all wore military uniforms. This, then, was one of those typical tribunals, made up of anybody at hand. This one was composed of laborers and campesinos. At the start of the trial, the president of the tribunal, Mario Taglé, put his feet up on the table, crossed one boot over the other, and leaned back in his chair and opened a comic book. From time to time, he turned to the men on each side of him and showed them some tidbit that had struck him as particularly funny. They’d all laugh. And the sad truth was that paying any attention to the