Читать книгу Against All Hope - Armando Valladares - Страница 14

7

A MODEL PRISON

The prison on Isia de Pinos was at that time the largest in Cuba. It was the so-called Model Prison. The Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado had it built in the 1930s. It had six enormous circular buildings, with a much larger capacity than was needed when it was first built. Someone asked Machado why he had the prison built so big; they said it would never be filled. But Machado answered, “Don’t you worry. Somebody will come along who’ll manage to fill it up.”

That somebody was Fidel Castro.

There were 312 of us in that particular group; we were the last contingent of the largest single transfer of prisoners that had ever been carried out in the Cuban prison system. Political prisoners were being concentrated in unimaginable numbers at Isla de Pinos.

The main gates of the first line of security opened to let the procession of trucks through. Handsome, well-cared-for gardens were the first thing the newly arrived prisoner saw. Common prisoners watered and weeded the rosebushes and hibiscus plants. The gardens were bounded at the rear by an arc made up of the Headquarters Building in the center and rows of houses for the officers on each side. Behind that arc rose the enormous masses of the “Circulars,” which housed the inmates.

“Get out, you sons of bitches! Now you’re really prisoners! You’re on the Island!”

The insult slapped us in the face, but no one responded. We began to jump out of the truck. In front of me, two of my comrades were handcuffed together; one of them tried to find some support before he jumped, but a guard came up behind him and kicked him off the truck to the ground. As he fell, he pulled his handcuff mate off with him, spraining his wrist with the metal bracelet. Up on the truck, the guard broke out into a mocking laugh picked up by the rest of the soldiers. One of them walked over to the two prisoners trying to stand up, battered and bruised by the fall, and said to them, “See how nice we are here? We even help you get off the truck.” And once again came the mocking laughter. The rest of us there were completely powerless. We didn’t even dare protest, because we thought that if this was just the beginning, who dared find out too soon what the rest would be like.

Immediately, a jeep pulled up; they asked about one of us, a man who had been involved in an incident in which a militiaman had been killed in an exchange of fire with anti-Castro rebels. Two men also engaged in the incident had been executed by firing squad; this man had been sentenced to thirty years.

“Where is that son of a bitch?” screamed a sergeant, getting out of the jeep in a fury.

“That’s him,” one of the soldiers who had escorted us from Havana answered. “Let’s go, get a move on. Now you’re going to see who it is you’re dealing with.”

They pushed the prisoner toward the jeep, and the sergeant and his troop rained blows on him as they shoved him in. One of the guards struck out with the butt of his rifle, and a low moan escaped the poor man’s lips. He was hardly more than a boy yet.

“Take him to the punishment pavllion,” yelled the tall fat sergeant, who seemed to be the one in charge of that group.

“And the rest of you,” he went on, speaking to those of us standing there waiting, “get into formation over there. On the double. Get a move on.”

We lined up in ranks, and they began to check our names against the list the escorts had brought from Cuba.

“Now then, which ones were in the little strike?” the sergeant sneered.

The guards called out Cheo Guerra, Guillermo, and others. Several militiamen broke off from the group, their rifles raised, their bayonets fixed, and pointed to the path the prisoners were to take, a road running into the rest of the prison installations.

“Run! On the double!” they shouted at the prisoners’ backs. They prodded and jabbed at them with their bayonets. We saw them run off, and we were horrified to see, as blood tinged their thighs, the color of their pants grow darker and darker. One of them stumbled and fell, and on top of him landed the guards’ boots; they kicked him until he lay there unconscious in a pool of blood. He was dragged away by his arms. This was one of the favorite diversions of the guards, as we later learned. But for us, at that moment, it was a spetacle out of Dante. How far we were from imagining that there would be many times when from our cells we would see that same ferocity, that same viciousness, unleashed against other prisoners who kept arriving, day after day, at the Island!

“Okay, let’s go. Up these stairs!” said the leader of the escort, and we began to walk up the steps, which led to some minor offices and the General Headquarters of the prison; once there, we were led along a corridor. Not for a single moment had they left off insulting and harassing us.

We came to the end of the corridor and went down a stairway to the back part of the central building, a kind of basement where militiamen were already waiting for us before several piles of prison clothes. These were the uniforms of the old Army, but with one black P on the back and two others on the trouser legs.

“All right! Get those clothes off, all of you! Everybody! Strip!” Everything was a rush, everything had to be done in a hurry, under the constant menace of being beaten or run through with a bayonet. We began to take off our clothes — shirt, pants, undershirt, and underwear, everything lay at last at our feet.

“Shoes, too, goddammit!” another guard yelled. And we took off our shoes and socks too.

It is impossible for me to describe what I felt at that moment. I suppose the other prisoners thought and felt the same thing I did, standing there like that, naked, facing the wall, with those militiamen and guards laughing and making fun of us, cracking jokes about our nakedness. There is nothing so depressing as being trapped in such a situation.

“Okay, turn around now and stand still until you’re called,” said one of the soldiers.

They began calling us one by one over to a bench which stood between us and the guards, where they would carry out the search of our property, if the little that we had brought with us — some cans of jam, medicine, toothpaste, soap, underwear — could be called property. But they looted it anyway. Anything that was of any value, or that they simply took a liking to, was “confiscated.” My watch attracted Lieutenant Paneque’s attention, and he almost broke my wrist when he ripped it off me. Now I definitely gave it up for lost. They were like Vikings or Huns, dividing up the booty right there in front of us. With what seemed unlimited brazenness, they argued over the most trivial items — some socks, a razor, a pen, or a ballpoint.

I was wearing a crucifix that a young friend of mine, Neno Medina, had given me as a gift. Neno was hardly sixteen years old, but Castro hadn’t managed to deceive him. His whole family had asked for political asylum in Venezuela during the dictatorship of Batista because his father was one of Castro’s revolutionaries. Neno may not have “known,” but he intuited that Communism was no good for Cuba. Neno called Fidel “Fidelovsky” as early as 1960. He was forced to enter the militia, though he knew the Revolution that his father had fought and died for had been betrayed. He was sent to the mountains of Escambray as a driver in a military operation intended to besiege and strangle the guerrilla strongholds from which the rebels launched their attacks against Castro. Neno could not stand that, after all, he was on the rebels’ side — so he made a mortal decision: driving a truck full of troops, he floorboarded the accelerator and steered the truck over a precipice. Everyone died.

Lieutenant Paneque’s hand stretched out toward the crucifix and grabbed it with fury. He brutally stomped and kicked the wooden cross until it was scattered in pieces across the floor.

Suddenly, at the opposite end of the room, there were bursts of laughter and outcries of indignation, and almost immediately a prisoner who was protesting lunged at one of the guards searching him. Several militiamen jumped on him. The prisoner fought, bit, scratched, until the guards beat him to the ground. His head was smashed and his face was covered with the blood gushing from his nose. He tried to stand up, but they booted him to the floor once more. The rest of the guards surrounding us stepped back immediately when the fight broke out and gripped their rifles and machine guns nervously, though nonetheless menacingly.

“Nobody move! Put your hands up and careful what you do or we shoot!”

They were afraid, they were nervous; they were actually fearful that unarmed, naked men might try something, and I felt that we somehow grew before that rabble who could hardly hold their weapons up for the trembling of their hands. Immediately, they took out the man that had attacked the guard. We didn’t know what had happened, what had provoked the incident, we only saw his wounds and the marks of the boots that had kicked him senseless. Two guards dragged him out of the room, leaving a trail of blood on the floor. Many of us thought he’d surely die from the beating and the wounds.

Later, we found out that the guard who was searching him had come across a photograph among the articles he was rummaging through and had asked the prisoner what whore house the woman in the picture worked in. That was the last straw. It was a photograph of our companion’s mother — a mother like mine, like everybody’s, one of the many mothers who suffered the terrible pain of separation from her children, of knowing that they were confined in jails where outrage, physical and psychological mistreatment, and abuse were the order of the day. The man couldn’t control himself when the guard sneeringly insulted his mother. Blinded by rage, tears of fury in his eyes, he attacked his offender. If only that poor mother could know that far from home, her son was being dragged out of the room almost dead from a beating the guards had given him for defending her!

Once the search and sacking were done, each inmate was given a change of clothing. Those who wore small or medium were given large-sized clothes, and the big or fat men were given smalls; we had to put the clothes on and leave the room dressed.

The thin ones had no problems — we simply wadded the pants around our waists and rolled up the cuffs and the shirtsleeves. For the fat prisoners, though, it was an ordeal. Tito struggled to try to pull on pants he couldn’t possibly wear. At last he managed to get into them, but there was a gap of six inches at the waist; there was no way to button them. They were so short they came halfway up his calves. This was another of the garrison’s diversions.

As we left, we passed a poster on the basement wall with a thought from Fidel Castro:

THE REVOLUTION IS GREENER THAN PALM TREES

We formed up in twos and began to walk. Guards prowled back and forth down both sides of the files. The entrance gate in the second security cordon opened; a guardhouse of concrete, with spotlights and a machine gun pointed toward the buildings, stood as though at attention at the gate. Now we were inside the prison.

From that point, the gardens were completely lost to sight. The gate behind us had opened onto a completely foreign world, which many of us now entering would never leave. We walked between Building 5 and Building 6 — enormous rectangular buildings, five stories high — and before us rose the huge, seven-story, iron-and-concrete piles which were the Circulars. Though built to house 930 inmates each, they would come to shelter 1,300. There were four of those buildings; at their center, as though the prison area were a great die with the number five up, stood the dining hall. It too was circular, though only two stories high. It could handle five thousand men at one sitting; the kitchen and storerooms were in that building too.

We kept walking on between Circulars 1 and 2. From dozens of windows, prisoners waved and shouted at us, but the guards told us not to shout or raise our hands to respond. Anyone who tried it was beaten. We marched along an asphalt walk around the side of the dining hall and stopped before, the large iron gate of Circular 4, our destination. Above the door, there was an ironic sign: WELCOME TO CIRCULAR 4.

The entrance had a large guardhouse made of unpainted concrete blocks and roofed with corrugated sheets of cast fiber-cement. Through the windows, the prisoners who had arrived the day before shouted at us, called by name to those of us that they had met at La Cabaña. But the guards were not speaking. It was as though when they arrived at that point, they didn’t have to have any relationship with us whatsoever. We were utterly other to them now. And that lifted my spirits; I dared to raise my head and look up, up to the highest barred windows of the fifth and sixth floors, from which hands were waving in greeting. Then I slowly lowered my eyes down the side of the building to the windows of the first floor, which were very near me. The men behind those iron palisades looked like skeletons; their faces were white and waxen from lack of sun. One of them was so emaciated that he seemed unreal. He didn’t speak, he didn’t wave or gesture, he was simply there, staring — he looked to me like a figure in a wax museum. However, not one of the men there could have spent more than two years and a few days in that jail. Just thinking about it sent a shiver of terror up my spine. Two years! I would never be able to stand it. How could they still be alive? Why hadn’t they died?

At last they opened the entrance gate, after having counted us several times. A throng of prisoners waited on the ground floor in a circular prison yard about eighty yards in circumference. In the center, a concrete tower rose to the height of the fourth floor. At the top, a little balcony with a railing for the watch ran around it. A low metal roof opened onto the balcony. The tower could be reached only by way of a tunnel which ran from the outside, so that soldiers could enter it without having to come inside the Circular itself.

Around the Circular, opening onto the inner well like an enormous beehive, were the cells. They were lined up one after another, ninety-three cells to a floor. In front of them, circling each floor, was a balcony with an iron railing, so that the balconies were hallways of a sort, along which one could safely walk. Communication from one floor to another was by way of a large marble stairway and four other, smaller stairways, which connected the ground floor to the first floor of cells. In the prison yard, there on the ground floor, there were no cells, only washbasins and showers. The cells themselves were small, with one large window barred with square iron rods. The sixth floor had no walls or divisions — it had been used before as a confinement and punishment area for common prisoners. Several cells had been there at one time, but they had been demolished. Now, because of the overpopulation, they were being used as well. This building, Circular 4, had bars on the cells of the first floor, unlike any of the other Circulars. These cells too had been used as punishment cages before the influx of political prisoners. The rest of the cells had no bars, and one might stroll along the corridors or go up and down the stairs from one floor to another.

The building was like a Roman circus. Everyone was talking, and yelling at the same time. A few of us went up to the base of the tower and dropped our bundles so we could rest and take our bearings. High up on the other floors, leaning on their elbows on the railings, many inmates looked down at us curiously. Some of the newcomers were helped by acquaintances, already installed, to take their bags and bundles up and to find a place to sleep in the cells. Boitel, Carrión, and I watched all that as though dumbstruck — that absurd world where everything seemed to have some strange “otherness” about it. “How those cursed wretches shout!” — that was one of Carrión’s favorite phrases; he had taken it from Don Juan Tenorio by Zorilla, and Alfredo would repeat it whenever it most seemed to fit, like now, when the yelling and screaming threatened to drive us all crazy.

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Silence; I implore you!” That was the voice of Lorenzo, the major of the building, a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-pound mulatto who had been a motorcycle officer in the police force of the previous regime. By secret ballot, the prisoners elected a kind of internal government they called the Mandancia, a half-joking argot word that might be translated “Board of Directors” or “Boss-ship.” It was the responsibility of the Major to appoint those who would be in charge of the daily operation and maintenance of the building — cleaning, serving the mess, and other tasks. The Major was the man who dealt directly with the guards and who brought us any messages or orders they wanted sent to us. At the beginning of 1959, the ex-soldiers of Batista’s army sent to that prison had to tolerate Mandancias made up of common prisoners and imposed on them by the garrison. Those Mandancias collaborated with the garrison, of course; suffice it to say that the common prisoners had portraits of Fidel Castro in their cells and enjoyed the protection of Prison Headquarters. Within a few months, thanks to the efforts of a man named Beruvides, one of the Air Force pilots who was imprisoned there, the military managed to oust common prisoners from leadership. The first groups of political prisoners had not yet arrived; the only prisoners kept there then were ex-officers and soldiers from Batista’s army.

“Well, let’s go up,” said someone in the group, and we picked up our duffels and began to walk over toward the stairs.

We had to pick our way through long ranks of pails and every other imaginable kind of container, set out in the prison yard in meandering files like the course of some strange river. We soon found out why: Water was rationed in the prison. Each man was allowed five liters of water per week. That was the only water for drinking, for washing your face, for bathing, for washing clothes. Naturally, it wasn’t enough. The reason for this rationing was that the installations which supplied the prison with water were being repaired. The trucks they used now to deliver water belonged to another agency, and they couldn’t be relied on. On this particular occasion, nine days had elapsed since the last delivery. We were informed of all this when we asked one of the “veteran” prisoners where we could get some water. One of the men, who had been a patient in the National Psychiatric Hospital, knew Boitel, and he had invited us into his cell to rest for a few minutes. He lived on the first floor. He told us he’d ask around to try to find us a little water, but that there would be very little of it. That same afternoon, the militia had said, the tank truck would be arriving, but hardly anyone believed it. The prisoners hoarded their water like the real treasure it was.

The man who finally shared some of his water with us was an old fellow who lived alone in one of the cells on the first floor. When Boitel’s friend asked him to give us some, he peered at us keenly and took a pail covered with cardboard out from under his cot. We saw that there was a little water in the bottom.

“I don’t drink much, very little, you know, and that’s why I still have some left.” He gave us each a sip. I became even thirstier — I realized I could have drunk down the whole pailful.

We made our way on up to the sixth floor. The men who had arrived the day before had managed to get empty cells, so they took many of us in. The traffic on the stairways never stopped — cots were moved from one floor to another, from one cell to another. The cells had two of these beds, which prison slang called “airplanes.” I never managed to find out why, though probably they called them that because they folded up like wings. The frame was made of tubing to which a piece of canvas or burlap was sewn. They were held to the wall by two steel eyebolts sunk into the concrete, and hung by two chains attached higher up, so they were cantilevered. They could be taken up during the day, and were opened out only when they were going to be used. Having one of those canvas “airplanes” in good condition was the height of luxury for a prisoner.

Carrión, Piñango, Boitel, Jorge Víctor, and I, with a few more friends, had stayed together through all the bustle of the move. We were utterly exhausted when we finally managed to reach the sixth floor. In prison one has dozens, hundreds, of friends, but there is always a smaller group with whom you spend most of your time. Those are the ones with whom you share not only most of your hours but that necessity to communicate as well, which for some prisoners is more important than all the rest. Jorge Víctor was a quiet type; he hardly spoke, and he gave the impression of being solid and equable, as he in fact was. He had been studying to be a priest, and it always seemed as though he were wearing an invisible habit. He was an extraordinary companion, and Carrión joked with him all the time. He had been detained the same morning the rest of us had. Jorge Víctor immediately plunked down on the floor, impassive, and in a while the rest of us followed suit. We each found a spot in that square cell, took out our blankets, and settled down to sleep as best we could. The next day we’d try to find some mattresses, get our hands on some “airplanes,” and stake out our own cells, but meantime, in spite of the discomfort of the tiny cell with its unfinished floor pocked with holes, we almost immediately sank into deep sleep. The last few days had exhausted us.

Carrión woke us up just a few minutes after we had fallen asleep. There was a rat running around all over us. Rats were another of those things that were to keep us company as long as we were in jail. It wouldn’t be a prison without rats, but they were insignificant on Isla de Pinos, compared to what we would see in the future.

As a matter of fact, events of all sorts conspired to keep us from getting any sleep to speak of that night. In the early hours of the morning, a screaming and crying and infernal noise woke us up with a start. We got up and looked out over the railing. We could see the entrance bars from where we were standing; the spectacle appeared to be from some strange hallucination. They had finally brought the tank truck of water. But what they did was stick two four-inch hoses through the bars and open the valves — the precious liquid was being poured out onto the ground, and the first prisoners, half asleep, were running down the stairs screaming “Water!”

Prisoners rushed frantically down the stairs into the prison yard, carrying pails, cans, jars — anything that would hold water. Hundreds of men were filling their containers as their turn came in the snaking lines. They were running down the stairs like demons, yelling and screaming. Above that howl Major Lorenzo’s thundering voice could be heard: “Stay calm, gentlemen, stay calm!”

But those men were no longer civilized beings; they acted like a herd of thirst-maddened animals that suddenly get wind of water nearby and break into stampede. They ran up and down the stairs; some of them, more agile than the rest, swung from the railings and jumped from floor to floor like monkeys, running the risk of falling headlong into space.

“Please, gentlemen, let’s act like human beings!” Lorenzo kept crying, shirtless but still wearing his dark glasses. I don’t think he ever took them off. He was up next to the bars beside the hoses. The volume of water the hoses spewed out was enough to fill the containers immediately, and as the hose went from one pail to another gallons and gallons of water were wasted. There was already a great pool in the prison yard. Someone was running and slipped and fell ... but men kept on running down hallways and stairs.

I stood there looking at all that as though I were hypnotized, until a prisoner ran along behind us with a plastic pail.

“Hey, you guys, get a move on or you won’t get any water!” And those words of his woke us up. It was true, and we were very thirsty. We picked up our pails and took off running; we hurtled down the stairs. I felt that I was going through my initiation, that I was becoming just another prisoner, just another one of those men.