Читать книгу Against All Hope - Armando Valladares - Страница 12

5

THE YEAR OF THE FIRING SQUAD

Early in 1959, on January 21, to be exact, Castro gave a speech in front of the Presidential Palace in which he declared, “There will not be more than about four hundred henchmen and conspirators against the Revolution that we will execute.” But many more than that had already fallen before the firing squads in those days of barbarity and death.

On January 12, on a firing range located in a small valley called San Juan, at the end of the island in the province of Oriente, hundreds of soldiers from the defeated army of Batista had been lined up in a trench knee-deep and more than fifty yards long. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were machine-gunned there where they stood. Then with bulldozers the trenches were turned into mass graves. There had been no trial of any kind for those men. Many of them were hardly more than boys, who had joined the army because money and food were scarce at home. The mass execution was ordered by Raúl Castro and attended by him personally. Nor was it an isolated instance; other officers in Castro’s guerrilla forces shot ex-soldiers en masse without a trial, without any charges of any kind lodged against them, simply as an act of reprisal against the defeated army.

By 1961 the Cuban people’s struggle against the growing strength of Communism was becoming more determined every day. Flames devoured large warehouses and stores in Havana. Hundreds, thousands of acres planted with sugar cane were fodder for the flames; the Cuban nights were illuminated by those bonfires. Bombs destroyed telephone and electric lines and derailed trains. Armed confrontations in both the mountains and the cities constantly broke out between the patriots and the repressive forces.

And government terror tactics grew in step with the resistance. Guilty and innocent alike fell before the firing squads. In the mountains when government troops captured some of the alzados, the alzados would be shot down where they were captured, and doctors of forensic medicine would cut open their abdomens to try to find the rest of the guerrilla groups by seeing what the contents of the dead men’s stomachs were and determining where such food might be found.

Castro had declared in the auditorium of the Federation of Cuban Workers building, “We will answer violence with violence. We may not have God on our side, but we do have an infantry — and it’s the finest in the world.”

Juan Carlos Alvarez Aballí had the bad luck to be detained at his home in the middle of that period of violence. He was told only that there were some things he had to clear up at Political Police Headquarters. He was in his shirtsleeves; when he started to put on a jacket and tie, the soldiers told him he’d be back in less than an hour, he didn’t have to get all dressed up. He kissed his wife and children. He was calm and confident; after all, he knew he had done nothing wrong. One of the agents, the oldest one, even had a few words for his wife: “Don’t worry ma’am, in an hour at most I’ll bring him back myself.”

Alvarez Aballí’s brother-in-law, Juan Maristany, had been involved in conspiratorial activities, a weapons-theft plot; seeking to evade capture by Castro’s forces, he had taken asylum in a neutral embassy. That was the only reason that Alvarez Aballí was arrested now. Since the authorities couldn’t get their hands on Maristany in the embassy, at least they’d have Alvarez. So there he was, in the prison yard, awaiting a trial on charges that had no substance to them — atrial at which, he thought, he’d be found innocent and walk out a free man. That, at least, is what he thought until he heard the prosecutor’s statement of the charges. Alvarez was accused of conspiring with his brother-in-law, and the prosecutor was asking for the death penalty. When the prosecutor read him the statement, Alvarez Aballí collapsed weeping and repeating his protestations of innocence.

By the afternoon they called him to trial, he was serene; he had placed his trust in God. Firmly, sincerely, movingly, he related to the tribunal the story of his entire life. He had dedicated it wholly to his work and his family; it was the furthest life imaginable from a life of political activism. His defense attorney even dared — and it was an act of true courage — to present in evidence a letter from Maristany himself, certified by the ambassador, in which Maristany stated that he and he alone was guilty of the arms theft and explained in detail certain facts which proved that Alvarez Aballí was innocent. The tribunal rejected the letter as evidence, although they did suggest that if Maristany left the embassy and turned himself in to the authorities they would change Alvarez’s verdict.

The day after the trial had ended, Alvarez Aballí was led to the cells for those condemned to death. With him went another prisoner who had better luck — he was removed from the cells moments before Alvarez Aballí was carried to the firing squad. This man told us that Alvarez Aballí became somehow larger, grander when he was faced with the fact of his own death, and spent all his time praying. He embraced his friend in farewell when the time came, but not a single tear rose to his eyes.

When they took him out and led him toward the moat, he passed in front of the portraits of Fidel and Raúl Castro. He paused a moment and then exclaimed, “And to think that because of those two wretches there are about to be five orphans!” Angrily, he turned toward Lieutenant Manolito, head of the prison, and said to him, “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

Throughout the whole extent of the island, the firing squads were carrying out their executions. It was during those days that Captain Antonio Nuñez Jimenez declared that from that moment on, the year 1961, officially designated the Year of Education, would be called the Year of the Firing Squad. And his prediction came true.

Men who had been sentenced to death did not return to the galeras after their trial. They were led to tiny cells located down at the end of galera 22, alongside the cells for Revolutionary Army soldiers sentenced to prison terms for robbery, drug abuse, and so forth — “common crimes” as opposed to “political crimes.” The prisoners sentenced to death would have to walk down the entire length of the galera of those common prisoners. The common prisoners were kept separate from us political prisoners by the little yard surrounded with high fences just at the main gate. We could see them from our yard, but there was no chance of physical contact with them.

It might have been that they thought they could score some points with the prison guards, or it might have been that they were actually channeling their hatred of those who stood up against the Revolution that many of them had supported, and still supported. For whatever reason, all through that walk, those common prisoners, “delinquents,” real criminals, would harass the men sentenced to death, who would have their hands tied behind their backs and be led by guards; they would insult them, spit at them, throw things at them, push them. And it was not solely those few moments of walking down the galera that were exploited by the common criminals to harass the political prisoners. There were even some who would follow them to their cells on that improvised Death Row to which the common prisoners had access, and keep on insulting them, screaming at them there, denying them in their last hours the peace and seclusion that would have allowed them to pray, meditate over their lives, be still.

The guards did nothing about the harassment. The authorities did not even deign to disguise their approval of those proceedings. On the contrary, whenever there were political prisoners on Death Row, the authorities would pass out liquor to the common criminals to get them drunk so they’d sing the “Internationale” and crow about the triumphs of the Revolution and the beating the counterrevolutionaries had taken and were taking.

Some of the prisoners spoke to the authorities and requested them to put a stop to the delinquents’ standing in front of their cells insulting and yelling at them. But the authorities had not an iota of compassion for them. From the moment the condemned men came out of the tribunal trials with their hands tied behind their backs and began walking to the cells of that Death Row, their escorts pushed and shoved them, mocked and laughed at them. The guards even stripped them of their shoes and threw them to the common prisoners, who fought over them like vultures.

And when the platoon of guards led them to the firing squad, the farewell the political prisoners received from the common prisoners in galera 22 was cries of “Viva Fidel Castro! Viva la Revolución!”

When the van with the members of the firing squad passed through the entrance that opened into the moats, the unmistakable sound of its motor would be heard throughout the galeras and of course in Death Row, where the men knew the decisive moment was at hand. Througout the galeras, the murmur of voices in prayer would begin. Otherwise, we prisoners, lying on our cots, kept an oppressive, painful silence, a silence made even more painful by our absolute impotence to prevent the death of one who until a few hours before had shared with us his hopes, his dreams, his troubles. A throng of images and thoughts whirled through our heads during those moments: his fatherless children, his widow, his mother prostrate with grief. And the thought too, which made us shiver, that the man the firing squad awaited could well be any one of us. Often I would suddenly see myself with my hands tied, gagged, led into the moat ... descending those steps to the wooden stake before the wall of sandbags, the spotlights trained on it ... officers shoving me against it and pulling a piece of rope tight around my waist ... the soldiers raising their rifles and deafening thunder echoing all along the moats. ... That could happen to me; I expected it. Every night I rehearsed that journey. I could see every inch of it in my mind. I knew the route by memory — every step, the wooden stake. ...

There were nights when there would be ten or twelve executions. You would hear the bars of the man’s cell door and someone coming to the bars to see his friend and cry out to him the last goodbye. There was no way to sleep in the galeras. That was when God began to become a constant companion of mine, and when death became a door into the true life, a step from the shadows into eternal light.

The blows of the hammers nailing together the wooden coffin would echo from the stone walls of the moats. The corpse was not given over to the relatives so they could hold a wake and funeral or accompany it to the holy ground of a cemetery. Instead, a van with INRA (National Institute of Agrarian Reform) painted on its side took the body to Colón Cemetery, where it was buried in a common grave, in a plot reserved for that purpose by the Ministry of the Interior. In the van would be an officer from the Political Police and several soldiers. The body was buried without a marker or headstone or anything else to identify it. The family did not even have the sad privilege of knowing where their loved one was buried.

But it was not only corpses that disappeared; some detainees were secretly subjected to interrogations and, when the authorities had finished, taken directly from Political Police Headquarters to the firing squad. We could see that happen sometimes from our galeras. Once when I was in the prison yard with a group of my friends, I saw them take down a gagged man with his hands tied behind his back. He was dressed in olive green. They shot him hurriedly. He had not come out of that prison; no one knew who he was. And that happened many times — men were executed and buried secretly.