Against All Hope. Armando Valladares
Headquarters. Say what one would, do what one would, the sentence was not to be changed.
The prosecutor began the examination with Obregón, accusing him of being an enemy of the people. Then he asked him whether he had ever known me, or run into me at work, in meetings, or “casually.” Obregón answered that he had not. He asked Zoila the same question. He received the same answer. No one knew me; none of them accused me of anything at all. The prosecutor called up the leader of the police squad that had arrested me in my house.
“It was you who made the arrest of the accused?”
“Yes, sir, and we searched his house thoroughly, but we didn’t find anything.”
“Quiet! Don’t answer unless I ask you!” the prosecutor shouted at him, visibly angered by the agent’s spontaneous declaration. Not that it mattered in any material way, but that exchange of words was beneficial to me in the eyes of the few spectators present — all military men, since relatives were forbidden to attend the trial, even had they known that it was being conducted. We had already been told by Obregón’s defense attorney, Dr. Aramis Taboada, who had connections inside State Security and who often defended political prisoners in the early ‘60s, that there were not to be any death sentences handed down at our trial. One can imagine what a relief that was to all of us. Still, one wanted the trial to go well, whatever that might mean under the circumstances.
The prosecutor asked me two or three questions, largely related to my religious beliefs.
“Then you agree with those priests that are always preaching and writing counterrevolutionary sermons?”
“I have nothing to do with any of that.”
“But our investigations indicate that you have many connections among the priests, and that you went to a Catholic school.”
But the prosecutor could not bring forward any evidence against me, so he began a long monotonous speech about Cuba before Castro. He lashed out against Yankee exploitation, he spoke about prostitution, and he ended by saying that all of us accused in that courtroom wanted to return to the ignominious past of the capitalist exploiter.
He then turned to the president of the tribunal and told him that I was an enemy of the Revolution who had committed the crimes of public destruction and sabotage. Public destruction is the name they give the ravages caused by a bomb, arson, or any other act of sabotage. He recited a number of laws which supposedly determined the punishment I merited.
But neither then nor later — because for twenty years I kept asking — could any of the authorities tell me where I had committed an act of public destruction. Such a crime, one would think, is concrete, visible, palpable. I asked the prosecuting lawyer where — in which factory, in what business, on what date — I was supposed to have caused this damage. He was unable to answer, because I had, of course, never done anything of the kind. It was like a murder trial in which the district attorney, asked who has been killed, says he doesn’t know; and asked about the corpse, says there is no corpse. Imagine killing a figment of someone’s imagination.
No tribunal in a more rightist regime could have found me guilty. There was not one witness to accuse me, there was no one to identify me, there was not a single piece of evidence against me. I was found guilty, simply out of the mistaken “conviction” held by the Political Police.
And sadly, my case was no exception. Dr. Taboada, Obregón’s defense attorney, had been one of Castro’s fellow students at the University, and after they graduated they had worked for the same law firm. On one occasion, Castro asked Taboada to write a book about those years. It was, one assumes, to be an apologia for the dictator, a work meant to swell the already extensive corpus of memoirs, biographies, and accounts which documented Castro’s cult of personality. Taboada kept putting off the request, until one day he wound up in the political jails. Years later he was given a reprieve, but only for a while. In 1983 he was imprisoned again, charged with being one of those responsible for a report which generated an international protest campaign. News was leaked to the outside world that five young syndicate members had been shot before a firing squad for having tried to organize an independent union modeled on Solidarity.
Another of the best-known cases was that of Dr. Rivero Caro, a lawyer like Taboada and a practicing journalist as well. He says he has never forgotten the words of Idelfonso Canales, the Political Police interrogator, who was frustrated and visibly angry at not being able to extract a confession from his detainee, even under torture, and who finally told him straight out, “Do you know what has you so balled up? That lawyer mentality of yours, that’s what. You’re seeing your situation with that mentality, a lawyer’s mentality, but you’re wrong to take that point of view. You see, what you say at the trial doesn’t matter; whatever proof you may be able to bring forward doesn’t matter either; what your lawyer says, what he alleges or proposes, doesn’t matter, what the prosecuting attorney says, the proofs he presents, doesn’t matter; what the president of the tribunal thinks doesn’t matter. Here the only thing that matters is what G-2 says.”
In a case in 1961, in which Jorge Gutiérrez was brought to trial, his court-appointed attorneys got access to the summary of charges two hours before the trial. The prosecutor knew that there were to be two death sentences at the trial. Because of the short time he had, one of the lawyers found it physically impossible to read the documents, and so he asked the prosecutor before the trial began whether there wasn’t some chance of reducing the demand for the death penalty. The prosecuting attorney told him that there was no chance at all, since the order to have them shot at nine o’clock the next morning had already been given. He added that the defense attorney should probably start doing the paperwork for the appeal, at least for form’s sake.
As when Dr. Taboada had found out that I was not to be given the death penalty, there were occasions when prisoners — those whose lawyers had contacts among the Political Police leaders — might find out before the trial was held what sentence was to be handed down by the tribunal. It was that sort of contact which allowed Commander Humberto Sorí Marín’s aged mother to discover that her son, one of the men closest to Castro, was to be found guilty of conspiracy and executed by firing squad.
Ironically enough, Sorí Marín had been the author of a notorious law under which dozens of Batista’s followers had been shot during the first months of 1959, at the beginning of the Revolution. So the morning Sorí Marín entered the prison yard of La Cabaña was perhaps the most difficult moment of his life. There was a galera full of men there waiting to be shot because of the law he had written. He had personally asked for the death penalty for many of them. And of course many men had already been executed under the provisions of the law. Therefore, he was shocked beyond belief when one of those prisoners who had been sentenced to death put out his hand and said, “Doctor, this side of those iron bars, we’re all in the same boat. So take a seat here among friends.”
The man speaking was ex-Commander Mirabal, the old head of Military Intelligence and one of the participants in Batista’s coup d’état on March 10,1952. He took Sorí Marín to the galera, found him a bed, offered him one of his best cigars, and said to him simply, “God have mercy on us all, Doctor.”
Sorí Marín had been one of Castro’s closest advisers and collaborators. He had fought next to him in the mountains and had been a member of his staff. He wrote and signed the Agrarian Reform Act. In the first months after the Revolution had come to power, his ties to Castro grew even closer. Castro was even in the habit of having lunch from time to time at Sorí Marín’s house, since Sorí’s mother was an excellent cook. Naturally, then, Señora Marín went to see Castro the minute she discovered that her son was to be executed. She was grief stricken. The meeting with Castro was very moving. The old lady cried as she clutched the Revolutionary Leader and pleaded with him.
“Fidel, I beg you, don’t let them kill my son. Please, for my sake ...”
Castro stroked her head gently. “Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to Humberto, I promise you.”
So Sorí Marín’s mother, beside herself with happiness, her eyes still brimming with tears, kissed Fidel and ran off to tell the family the good news.