Читать книгу Against All Hope - Armando Valladares - Страница 11

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 proceedings, even out of courtesy, was utterly unnecessary, and they knew it. The sentences had already been decided on and written out at Political Police 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. She had hoped that her son would be pardoned — Humberto and Fidel had gone through so much together, so much danger, so many hard times and so much anguish! Surely that shared past couldn’t simply be forgotten, just like that.

The next night, at Castro’s express order, Humberto Sorí Marín was shot by firing squad.

In galeras 11, 12, and 14 of La Cabaña were collected the most dissimilar types — officers in Batisa’s army and revolutionaries who had defeated them were all thrown in there together. Many of the former Castro supporters were, like Sorí Marín, to die under the same laws they had cited in executing their enemies. David Salvador was there, the leader of the 26th of July Movement and former secretary-general of the Federation of Cuban Workers. He was one of the most radical and fervent young Communists. In fact, it was he who grabbed the microphone away from the former president of Costa Rica, José Figueres, while Figueres was speaking at a meeting once. It seems that Figueres declared that if an armed conflict arose between the United States and the Soviet Union, Latin America would take the side of the Americans. Salvador was incensed by Figueres’s words; Fidel Castro, who was sitting on the dais too, smiled in sympathy with Salvador. Nevertheless a few months later David Salvador was sentenced to thirty years in prison as a counterrevolutionary.

Another of the prisoners in those galeras was Guillermo Díaz Lanz. He was the brother of the first commander of the Revolutionary Air Force. His brother had escaped to the United States within a few months of the Revolution’s takeover and was combating Castro from there. It was literally a crime for Guillermo to have such a brother. He was found guilty of being the brother of the “traitor” Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz. And that was all he was found guilty of.

The machinery of the Revolution was not to be halted, and like Saturn it devoured its own children. But within the prison population, there was a moving sense of camaraderie. There might have been isolated incidents of anger and resentment when a revolutionary arrived who had been a man’s arresting officer or the prosecuting attorney against a prisoner held there now under sentence of death, but those incidents happened very rarely. There were bankers, students, ex-soldiers from both sides in the recent civil war, workers, campesinos. But they shared a single identity, or a principle of identity, more powerful than old differences: Everyone bore the black P stenciled on the back of his uniform, and the same bayonets prodded and wounded them all, and the same bullets awaited them, the same firing squad.

The men who fought alongside Castro to establish democracy had been tricked; some fled the country, others took up arms again, or formed conspiracies against him. The army officers, police agents, and officials of the deposed regime who had been charged with crimes — unproven in many instances — had already been shot. But Castro had found a new enemy — the enemy within — and no one was safe from this threat of “instant justice.”

It was during those months that a group of women dressed in black would come into the galeras, peering intently, scrutinizing every face. All it took was for one of those women to lift a finger and point: “That one! That’s the one who killed my son!” The man stood accused. That testimony, without any other corroboration, was enough. The prisoner was shot. This situation lent itself, obviously, to personal vendetta; it didn’t necessarily require any real criminal action. The execution was often carried out without any trial, in fact.

The men who had been in La Cabaña since the beginning of 1959 say that whenever one of those delegations of women appeared at the prison gate some prisoners would hide under the beds. One case was notorious. A mother pointed out the supposed murderer of her son, and the man was executed within a few hours. But the next day her son, safe and sound, arrived from Venezuela, where he had fled without his mother’s knowledge. He showed up at the prison, horrified that an innocent man had been killed.