Читать книгу Against All Hope - Armando Valladares - Страница 15

8

ANIMAL PROTEIN

At five o’clock in the morning, a cornet’s, reveille called us to the headcount, which officers took every morning at six. The cornet player was a common prisoner who stood near the dining hall in front of Circulars 3 and 4. He played very well. Later, I would sit and watch him often in the afternoon. He would get drunk whenever he could on alcohol mixed with sugar, and those days he had to lean up against one of the columns of the building, because if he didn’t he would’ve fallen over. Curiously enough, the more plastered he was, the better he played. It was this cornet player who played “Taps” when they carried out the corpses of men who had died in the prison. The Major would call us all to attention, we prisoners would stand straight and tall, and everything would stop for a few moments. The only sound was the notes of “Taps” echoing movingly through the presidio.

Carrión and I had managed to find a cell on the second floor, number 64. Boitel didn’t want to move in with us; he liked to sleep late in the morning, so he had found a cot on the sixth floor, which was an ideal place for sleeping late. Jorge Víctor, Piñango, and the rest had already settled in with some other companions. But we would all get together to eat, and into our group came Manolito and Vladimir Ramírez.

Ramírez was a psychologist who had organized an action cell which was planning an attempt on Castro’s life, using Ramírez’ apartment as a base of operations. His apartment was located across the street from El Carmelo Restaurant, which the dictator frequented. They were discovered, though, and a shoot-out led to their arrest. Vladimir and Fernando López del Toro blockaded themselves inside the walls of a colonial mansion in EI Vedado, and it took a huge police siege to make them surrender.

Mealtimes became a time for conversation, with talk about all sorts of things but especially about political events in the country. The track of the conversation always led to the fall of the regime, because every day more and more rumors were coming in about the rise of internal resistance, about acts of sabotage, about the number of counterrevolutionaries in the countryside, and about the gigantic military operations which the government had been forced to carry out against the new anti-Castro guerillas.

The mess we ate at those times was cooked by common prisoners. The food was so tasteless and unseasoned, so flat, so dull and unappetizing, that we jokingly called it La Boba — “The Old Maid” — nobody really wanted to try it a second time. When the prisoners pushed the cart loaded with the vats of food up to the gate, the Major or the gatekeeper — another member of the Mandancia, whose job was to stay by the front gate for just this sort of duty — would cry out, “Here comes La Boba! Get your tools ready!” This announcement simply meant that all the prisoners were to line up floor by floor; each man was to have his plate and a canteen cup or jar at the ready.

The menu was not very varied. For lunch, there was rice and split peas; in the afternoon, there was boiled cornmeal and a greasy, watery soup. Generally, the split peas or some other kind of peas or beans had been sent to the prison because they were spoiled, and often enough they were wormy as well. When the food was prepared from such a shipment, a layer of tiny animals floated on top of the vats. But in even the most unpleasant circumstances, the Cuban will find a vein of humor; so when the beans full of worms were coming, the gatekeeper would call out, “Split peas with protein!”

For many days at first, I virtually lived on bread, for I had a certain squeamishness about what I ate. But prison and hunger cured me of that soon enough. Weeks later I would devour those peas, any food, as fast as the next man. When someone would say that the food was spoiled or tasted bad, Carrión always answered, “Who’s ever heard of a prisoner eating because he likes the food? Prisoners eat to survive.”

And it was true. You had to eat whatever they gave you, in order to survive, and I swore to myself to put aside all those scruples and swallow whatever came along. We would sometimes have macabre contests with our spoons, fishing out the little worms and pushing them to the side. They were small, yellowish-white worms with a kind of caramel-colored spot on the head. Little by little you lost your disgust for them, and rationalized the situation: “The little worms are dead, they’ve been boiled in the steam vats, so what harm can it do to eat them?” — “Absolutely none; the only thing is that you’re not accustomed to eating them. But just remember, in Asia they eat insects.” All these arguments prepare the mind, condition it, and that is the real secret of survival — mental control. We wound up stirring the soup up with the rice without wasting any more effort fishing out the worms. After all, it was true — they were protein. I never got sick from eating them, either.

Since it was the common prisoners, supervised by a militiaman, that cooked the food for us; since we were counterrevolutionaries while they were revolutionaries — even if criminal revolutionaries; and since a revolutionary is defined by, among other things, his hostility and aggressiveness toward counterrevolutionaries, some dreadful things happened to our food from time to time.

One morning the breakfast sugar water that was brought to us in a fifty-five-gallon drum — one of those used for holding fuel — began to taste funny as its level dropped. When there were only six or eight inches of the water left, it grew bubbly. The constant churning of the big serving ladle had whipped it into a froth. The inmates stopped serving it and ran a wooden paddle around in it; the paddle bumped something hard on the bottom. They decided to pour out what was left of the sugar water — and there were two bars of soap in the bottom of the drum.

On another occasion, more than half the length of a thick cow intestine, rectum included, was floating on top of the soup; intestine was still full of cowshit. We sent the soup back.

Complaints were made to the soldier who was head of the kitchen, but he always shrugged off any personal responsibility for things that happened. He would allege that whatever happened was the cooks’ fault. We frequently found pieces of broken glass. One day the food they brought in had dead rats in it. But the worst consequences of eating spoiled food occurred when we were served poisoned split peas one day. Thousands of prisoners came down with uncontrollable diarrhea and quickly dehydrated. The authorities became frightened, since dozens and dozens of prisoners, almost unable to walk, or even speak, came down into the prison yard. Intravenous kits and saline solution were brought over, but there were not enough to go around, so they had to notify the civilian hospital in Nueva Gerona. They didn’t have enough supplies to send, either. Therefore the Ministry of the Interior sent a plane from Cuba with a shipment of intravenous equipment and other medicines and supplies. The authorities admitted that the common prisoner who was head of the cooks had stirred some toxic substance into the food. They even knew what the substance was — they said it was a liquid sprayed on the split peas to protect them against insects. They assured us that punitive measures would be taken against him. But that inmate continued as head of the kitchen for a long time — until all common prisoners were removed from the prison, in fact, which was then staffed solely by political prisoners.

Until the spring of 1961, every forty-five days the prison sold certain articles to prisoners: spices, oil, salt, cigarettes, and cigars. With these items, we could disguise La Boba, fix her up. We recooked the food and added salt, a little oil, and some spices. All that came to an end in April 1961. However, even though there were no visits, every so many days they did allow prisoners’ families to send a little package containing powdered milk, sugar, and gofio de trigo. (Gofio de trigo became a staple food additive in the prisons. In the absence of really nutritive foods, this roasted wheat flour, something like prepared wheat germ but gummier when wet, supplied what few vitamins, even calories, we subsisted on.) Prisoners also persuaded the authorities to let our families send mattresses in to us. Cuba was still in the dying days of capitalism. Those packages would lead to another of our macabre jokes, as I’ll tell shortly.

Bathing during those first months was not possible. Water still had to be brought to the prison in the tank truck, and the quota allowed us only enough water for drinking.

At dawn and at evening, there was always the headcount. We had to stand in the cell doors, but only two men per cell; all the rest of us lined up in the prison yard. All the officers were very good at the counting, but the most talented of them all was a sergeant who had served in the ranks of Batista’s army. He was very soldierly — he clicked his heels and everything. Prisoners called this sergeant by the nickname Pinguilla — “Little Prick.” With one quick glance, his eyes flew over the six floors, and if, by the way the men were arrayed, his headcount did not balance out with the list he had, he would discover it instantly.

If a prisoner so much as leaned against the cell door at the moment the count was being taken, he would be carried off to the punishment cells. He would be beaten by Sergeant Naranjito, who never failed to carry the cavalry sword which he had inherited from the days he was in Batista’s rural guard. Naranjito was a true sadist; his favorite pastime and greatest pleasure consisted of running the prisoners to the punishment-cell pavilion, hacking at them with the broad side of the saber all the way.

The punishment-cell pavilion was located beyond the Circulars and the two rectangular one-story buildings, alongside the chapel, in some of whose large rooms common prisoners were lodged. The other building in that area, exactly in front of the punishment pavilion, was the hospital. Batista had left it very well equipped — it had a modern X-ray laboratory, a medical laboratory, an operating room, a pharmacy, a dental office, and all the rest — but its use for medical care of prisoners was kept to a minimum. All its rooms opened onto an interior patio.

Fidel Castro had been held prisoner in one of the rooms of that hospital, but he had been allowed visitors, national and international news, uncensored books, sun, unlimited correspondence, a conjugal pavilion, and any food he wanted. He had never been mistreated; they had never so much as pushed him. Now the authorities had Húber Matos there, one of the men who had fought beside Castro in the mountains. Húber Matos had come down from the Sierra Maestra with Castro holding the rank of commander, a title he had well earned in combat; but he diverged from the Marxist line of the Revolution, so he wrote a letter to Castro resigning his commission and his office as Military Chief of the Revolutionary Army in Camagüey Province. Castro accused him of being an ingrate and a traitor and sent him to jail, sentencing him and several of his officers to twenty years in prison. There was a special gaurd for Húber Matos. He was not guarded by the garrison of the presidio, but rather by a special group selected very carefully from among the Political Police. Castro feared the sympathies which the ex-commander could draw on among the ranks of the rebel army. Matos was held completely incommunicado from the rest of the prisoners. Even his food was brought in uncooked to his place of detention, so as to avoid any contact with other prisoners. It would be 1966 before Matos would finally leave his solitary confinement for the first time and enter into contact with the rest of the political prisoners.

One afternoon, from a window on the fifth floor, someone shouted that they were taking prisoners out of the punishment cells. The punishment-cell pavilion and the hospital could be seen perfectly from Circulars 3 and 4. Every two or three months, the authorities took out a number of prisoners, generally when the pavilion was overcrowded and they needed space to punish others. Among that group of released prisoners were Cheo Guerra and Guillermo Díaz Lanz, who had been sent there on our first day at Isla de Pinos. They had grown so gaunt that their bones were practically tearing through their skin. Their eyes were sunken, they were as pale as candlewax, and their faces were covered by a months-long growth of beard which made them almost unrecognizable.

They told us about the torments and miseries they had been through there. The common prisoners controlled everything. The punished prisoners were shut up in cells with the doors almost completely sealed with a sheet of iron. They had not had a bath in all that time, and they had known nothing of the outside world. Sometimes the common prisoners, by order of the posted militia, would throw pails of cold water on them, and sometimes dirty water as well, which had been used to rinse out the rags used for cleaning the floors.

News, rumors, and gossip were like a drug for a great number of prisoners. I had read about this phenomenon in books about concentration camps, but I had never thought it would be anything so complex, or that so many men would be sustained, in many cases, by simple information. Communists are perfectly aware of what information means to the prisoner, since by keeping him in touch with outside reality it allows him to put prison reality into perspective. Everything the Communists did, then, was directed expressly toward breaking that link, toward isolating the imprisoned man even more. During this period, they were still a little clumsy and green in their practices, but slowly, as the staff of the prisons and the Political Police were sent off and trained in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, their techniques grew more refined, more scientific, more inhumane, more psychologically destructive.

The mail was a constant frustration for us. When we first arrived, we were allowed to send a brief telegram telling our families where we were. The prison rules permitted us to receive one telegram and one letter, written on one side only of the paper, from our families monthly. Those of us who were lucky enough to receive the letters sent to us, which not all of us were, sometimes could hardly read them. Slogans — “The Fatherland or death,” “We will overcome,” and the like — would be rubber-stamped one on top of another, so that the dark ink of the rubber stamp would obscure the text of the letters.

About that time, I received a letter from my mother. She told me that she and my father had come to the prison to try to persuade the authorities to let them see me. Obviously nothing had come of that.

Newspapers were never allowed into the prison, and if one of the guards discovered a prisoner with one, the prisoner was taken to the punishment cells under a hail of blows. But in Circular 3, Macurán, an ex-soldier of the defeated army, had managed to put together a rudimentary radio which drove all the soldiers of the garrison crazy. They had conducted one search after another trying to find it, but it had always eluded them. When news came in over Macurán’s radio, six copies were made immediately, one for each floor and the news would be read out to small groups, of men. The guard on the tower had to be watched, but very few times during that period did the guards go up to the observation tower. Good news lifted the prisoners’ spirits into the clouds, and when the group dissolved, many men would exhibit signs of almost manic optimism and elation. There were even those who would follow the one man who had read the news into the next circle, to hear him read it again. It was really like a drug, an addiction.

The prisoners had invented a sort of sign language using their hands and fingers. It was similar to the sign language used by deaf-mutes, but not nearly so sophisticated. For example, circling one of the railings with the whole hand, as though gripping a baseball bat, was the letter D. Putting two fingers across a bar corresponded to the letter N and three fingers stood for M. This permitted the prisoners to communicate with amazing speed. It might easily have looked like something out of bedlam to a spectator who didn’t know what was going on, seeing those men behind their bars moving their hands like men possessed, opening and closing their fists or touching the iron bars several times. The news from Macurán’s radio — or gossip, for that matter — could be sent by this method over from Circular 3 and copied down by us in Circular 4. The two buildings were separated by only the thin strip of asphalt walkway.

But Circulars 1 and 2 were farther away, so hand language was impossible. We established communication with them, though, using Morse code. There were quite a few telegraph operators among us, and others of us learned it from them. A cardboard ruler or some other little piece of stiff white paper would be employed as a transmitter. One slap sideways with this little ruler was equivalent to dot; toward the front, dash. A while later communications were perfected when we put together a homemade blinker. Whistles made out of empty toothpaste tubes were also used, and thus was sonic communication born.

Speaking or calling from one Circular to another was prohibited. If someone was caught at it, he was sent at once to the punishment cages. And it wasn’t hard for the guards to catch prisoners. The guards walked beats around the Circulars. Outside each cell, under the window, the cell number was painted very prominently. The guard could easily see, then, which cell contained the rule-breaking prisoner. And of course there was no way to escape.

Keeping up communications was a first-priority task, and someone had managed to string a line for sending letters between the two Circulars. To shoot them over, all folded up, they used a sort of slingshot made of pieces of rubber tubing taken from the intravenous equipment. The projectile was a piece of lead to which a fine thread was attached. This thread was obtained by unraveling a nylon sock with much patient labor — the same work the textile factory did, but in reverse. T-shirts, sheets, or any other woven fabric might also be used.

The first times they tried to shoot a thread across with a letter, a problem became evident: the shot was so fast that however much trouble they took in winding the thread at the shooter’s feet, it always got tangled. Someone thought of the bobbins on looms, and the problem was solved. Thread was coiled around an aluminum cone, exactly as it comes from the factory on bobbins. When they made the shot with this new apparatus, another prisoner stood next to the shooter, with his hand stuck into the cone to steady and hold it. The lead piece shot off, and behind, with dizzying speed, the thread unwound cleanly.

On the other side, they stuck two broomsticks with a thread strung between them out the window of one of the cells closest to our Circular. They caught the piece of lead on the fly.

Prisoners kept adding refinements to the system — the latest advance consisted of using nylon fishing line that somebody had gotten from somewhere. This had the advantage of being almost invisible, so that it could be left in place. And since all this “archery” took place on the fifth floor, the guards couldn’t see anything from the ground. This system lasted until one fine afternoon when Lieutenant Paneque, walking unconcernedly along between the Circulars, looked upward, did a double-take, and stood petrified with his eyes glued on the Heavens. There before his eyes was a little bird sitting in midair, unmoving. That is how they discovered us — a beautiful, free little bird ruined our line of communications by perching on it.

“Search!” was the alarm cry among us. The garrison barracks was situated at the back part of the prison, very clearly visible from Circular 4. When there was going to be a search, platoons of soldiers would run out of the building. If they got onto trucks or came toward our Circulars, the alarm “Search!” was cried throughout the building. We could never know which Circular they were headed for, but the alarm was given in all four. They could never surprise us, since we had organized a twenty-four-hour vigilance committee. There was one man per floor, relieved every two hours, around the clock. Although the notification gave us only about a two-minute headstart on their arrival, this was enough to allow us to destroy any compromising papers and hide the radio or any other proscribed items. When the platoons of guards formed up in front of the entrance to the buildings, the prisoners were already on top of the situation, following every movement with full attention.

The guards, armed with machetes, truncheons, rubber-clad chains, and bayonets, would fill the prison yard in seconds. Several of them carrying rifles would appear on the central tower to keep watch on the high floors and on the movements of the prisoners. If they saw some suspicious operation, they would fire off a warning shot and point at the cell involved, screaming at the prisoner to raise his hands and not to move until the other guards below came to his cell.

Within the presidio, there were two enclosures or corrals about ninety yards square, formed by nine-foot chain-link fences crowned with barbed wire strung in a V. Two files of guards lined up from the entrance to the Circulars out to those corrals. They would be armed with fixed bayonets, and prisoners had to pass naked down that gauntlet at a dead run. The guards gathered at the main gate and flailed at the prisoners as they ran out. Then the guards in the two files prodded us in our backsides and thighs with their bayonets — always from behind. Every search left a toll of more than a hundred wounded by bayonet stabs, over and above the number of men beaten. And we returned to the Circular in the same way.

On our return, we would find the Circular looking as if a hurricane had blown through it. Clothes, shoes, toilet articles would be jumbled and strewn through the prison yard as they had been thrown down from the floors onto the ground floor. That is why we had put our prisoner number on everything, from our underwear and socks to our toothbrushes. After every search, many men would find their canvas or burlap cot covering slashed by a bayonet, or the sugar or powdered milk their families had sent them, and that they carefully rationed so that it would last forty-five days, poured out over the bed. Sometimes the powdered milk would be dumped into our pails of water. Cigarette packages would be cut in half, as would bars of soap.

The most important task after a search was to try to help the wounded. If a case seemed especially serious, because of a deep bayonet wound, for example, the guards on post would be notified so that they in their turn would inform their superior officer. The object of this long process was simply to get the wounded man taken to the little hospital where the authorities held the prisoners who were doctors. In subsequent weeks, more doctors came into the prison, and they usually came to the Circulars.

Among the common prisoners in that prison could be found the most dangerous kinds of criminals. Early in 1961, the authorities began several programs of indoctrination talks for those prisoners. They told them that the Revolution would give them the opportunity to become heroes, liberators of other countries laboring under the weight of dictators. They explained to them that the unjust society they had lived in before had forced them to become criminals, but, they told them, the future could be different. Then these prisoners were put through military training and sent off on an invasion of the Dominican Republic to topple Trujillo. But the Dominican dictator had his air force waiting for them. Not a single soldier managed to land; their ships were sunk many miles from the coast, and no one survived. Castro had notified Trujillo’s Intelligence Corps, giving them all the information they needed to intercept the military contingent.

Among the mass of common prisoners on Isla de Pinos at that time, however, were many men who sympathized with the political prisoners; they too loathed the system. These men helped us in many valuable ways and risked the danger of reprisals by doing so. Communication with them was not easy, since they were under absolute prohibition to speak to us. If he were caught at it, a common prisoner would be identified with us, with what we represented, and he would rot in the punishment cells.

Through the window of one of the cells on the first floor, right above the little road, Boitel and I managed to establish contact with one of those common prisoners. It was a labor of many days’ duration. The prisoner worked in the bakery, and at evening as he returned to Building 5, where the common prisoners then lived, he would pass three or four yards from the cell window, but he couldn’t stop. We would sit there next to the window and every day we would softly call one or two phrases to him. We had written them down and we would repeat them day after day. We asked him to find a newspaper for us; we asked him about the possibility, a little farther on, of smuggling, some correspondence in and out for us, a relatively easy thing for prisoners held for ordinary crimes to do, at least at that time. Finally, we managed to win him over. He agreed to collaborate with us in spite of the fact that we had warned him about the risks he was exposing himself to. And he didn’t do it for money — it was his way of undermining the regime.

We figured out a way to get the newspaper through. It had to be smuggled in not directly in front of the cell but several yards away from the Circular, so that anyone who saw him from a distance couldn’t possibly suspect anything. You had to take care not only against the militia, but also against the other common prisoners, among whom there were informers, collaborators with the garrison; they might easily denounce him.

That afternoon Boitel and I were posted at the window and Carrión was standing watch at the door when our man appeared at the end of the walkway coming toward us. We got our equipment ready.

We were going to snare the newspaper using a piece of green-dyed cord with a lead weight tied to the end of it. We would shoot the string through the bars of the window with a slingshot. I shot, and the string looped out to the edge of the little road. Then we let out enough slack so that it hung down right against the green wall; that way no observer could make it out.

Our friend was coming closer, looking surreptitiously at the edge of the road. Boitel gave a little tug on the string, which ruffled the grass. That was enough for the man to see the thread. He squatted down as though he were tying his shoelace and quickly took a small flat package out of his sock, made a lightning-quick gesture, and continued his walk. It took only a few seconds. We waited five very long minutes to give our friend time to get to his building, then Boitel very slowly pulled in the cord. Suddenly a guard jeep appeared turning in from behind the pavilion. Hurriedly, we played out a little string to keep it from being seen and jumped away from the window. It was getting dark now and that helped us. The jeep passed, and we breathed a little easier. We hauled up the package. What came into our hands was a copy of the newspaper Revolución, wrapped into a tight little bundle with a piece of thread.

From that day on, we had newspapers with some frequency. But we couldn’t talk about it — we knew that there were informers also planted among the thousands of men in our Circular. Boitel, Carrión, Ulises, and I decided to edit a bulletin with the most important news of the day and to distribute it, as we did with the news that Macurán gave us as well. We called our new little newspaper the Free Press.

Books were prohibited. There were only two which had been saved — no one knew how — when, months before, at the end of 1960, before our group arrived, the garrison took everything away. The two books which remained were a biography of Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig, and EI Hombre mediocre (Mediocre Man) by José Ingenteros. Several hundred men were signed up for their turn to read them.