Читать книгу Against All Hope - Armando Valladares - Страница 17

10

ON TOP OF A POWDER KEG

The presidio was located so near the north coast of Isla de Pinos that you could see the waters of the Caribbean from it. There was a cay offshore called Monkey Key (Cayo de Monos); it had gotten its name, so the story goes, because years before, monkeys used in research and laboratory experiments had been kept there. Some natives of Isla de Pinos swore that monkeys still lived out on the cay. To the west of the prison complex were the Sierra Caballo mountains; to the south there were extensive fields used for Army and militia exercises, tank practice, and a firing range; to the east were green pine groves, from which the island had no doubt gotten its name, and some low hills. Besides the garrison for the prison there were several military encampments, especially militia posts, scattered all around the area.

From the fifth floor of the Circular, you had an uninterrupted view for several miles around. Firing practices were held regularly, and whenever there were night exercises the artillery officers in the Circulars would stay up and watch. They could classify the guns and other weapons used and locate the nearby emplacements with considerable exactness. You could easily see the flares of the cannon blasts on the peaks of the nearby mountain range.

At night, from my cell, overlooking those mountains, I could sometimes make out the yellowish flicker and glow of matches the soldiers struck for their cigarettes. Toward the south, tanks shot their guns and machine guns stuttered. The orange trail of tracer shells would often sear through the dark night.

For some men, the firing was exciting — they’d hurrah and shout, even though they knew it was the enemy out there practicing. Those were always the men of action, men who had fought with the guerrillas, men for whom the memory of the roar of combat against the Communist militia was still fresh. They still seemed to yearn for those difficult and trying times, the privations, the thrills and the anguish — they had been free, then, at least, and brave, and they had been fighting for others’ freedom as well. But there were other men who grew nervous, some almost hysterical. You could see that the very sound of the firing affected them.

Ernesto Piñango and Armando Rodríguez, with the help of some technicians jailed with us, managed to put a radio together. Later, Rafael del Pino joined them in taking charge of the radio operation. Del Pino had been an early supporter of Castro, but had abandoned the cause and now was in prison for it.

The radio they made was very crude but it could pick up international news reports. The sixth floor was the ideal place for picking up those broadcasts, which sometimes mentioned the situation on the island. Piñango and Viscaya, as everybody called Armando, even put up an antenna at night, when the darkness and height made it safe. They would unscrew one of the roof tiles, slide it to one side, and stick the antenna up through the opening.

Batteries for the radio were made right there in the Circular. I don’t know all the details of the process, but I do know that once in a while somebody had to urinate into some jars because the technicians needed the urine. They used pencil lead, too; it seems several sticks of graphite bundled together could replace that core batteries have running down the middle. And through a contact in the hospital they got copper sulfate, another of the substances necessary to the recipe.

We heard the news over earphones made out of intravenous tubes. There were three sets of earphones. Men would copy out the news in shorthand, then write it out in longhand afterward. We made several copies, and then next morning each floor would get its morning newspaper.

The radio lasted for several years, partly because Piñango and Viscaya developed a hiding place that was practically discovery-proof. Actually, I should say hiding places, because they’d take the radio completely apart and hide it all over the Circular. The guards might have a piece of it in their hands and not know it had anything in the world to do with a radio. The two men would have to take special care in hiding the pieces, though, in case some spy was watching. Sometimes Piñango would leave the cell with a little package, apparently casually and equally apparently sneakily, and stuff the package into a hiding place. But that wasn’t the radio, or even a piece of it. That was a red herring he was dragging through the Circular. Meanwhile, somebody else would scurry off and hide the parts.

Carrión slept on the upper bunk. He slept so heavily you had to shake him if you wanted to wake him up. One morning just at dawn, I heard machine-gun rattle and the boom of cannons. I jumped to the window. On the peak of the hills the red-orange blaze of the batteries installed there lit up the early morning. Tracer shells scored the dark-blue sky; I couldn’t see or imagine their target. It didn’t seem like the usual firing practice, though.

I shook Carrión by one foot and rushed upstairs to the sixth floor to see if I could tell any better what it was all about.

In the Circular there was already a general alarm, and the confusion was incredible.

“They’re attacking us!” people were shouting. “They’re aiming right at us!”

But the Circular couldn’t have been the target of those projectiles; we’d have been blown to bits immediately if it had been. I came to the sixth floor. Men were standing on cans, on cots, or just on tiptoe, looking frantically, worriedly, out the windows. Some men had pulled themselves up to the window bars by the strength of their arms.

Just to the east of the presidio, almost directly above us, anti-aircraft shells were blooming into black popcorn clouds, and through them floated a B-26 bomber, its silver fuselage gleaming in the morning sun as the explosions peppered and sputtered all along its path.

I watched it fly into the distance, toward the mouth of the Las Casas River. From there a Cuban Marine emplacement began to shoot at it. The frigate Baire began to fire on it now.

The pilot of the B-26 suddenly saw the Baire and dived at it, machine guns blazing. It was like watching a war movie from the windows.

The frigate began to move, to take evasive action; the plane released its first rocket, and a huge spout of water rose before the frigate’s bow. The boat began to speed away.

Then the B-26 banked to the left. The guns began to fire at it from the hills again, and again it sailed peacefully, as though with Olympian detachment, through the artillery shells furiously hurled at it. That pilot must have had icewater in his veins. The plane’s blithe flight seemed to mock that curtain of fire aimed at bringing it down. The pilot headed the plane once more toward the ship, which was now firing on him again, and this time his aim was sure. The explosion of his rocket made the ship’s stern leap out of the water and wrapped it in a whirlwind of black smoke. The plane then, flew off toward the northwest.

The Bay of Pigs invasion had begun. It was April 17, 1961.

The scene we had witnessed produced incredible excitement among the prisoners. We immediately took the little radio out of hiding and set it up. Every imaginable theory of what was happening was vehemently expounded by one or another prisoner. Suddenly, military trucks lined up at battle stations around the Circulars, and the troops they were transporting, largely militia, jumped out, firing up at the windows.

A group of them ran to the main gate. There was no one in the prison yard or on the lower floor. They stuck the barrels of their machine guns through the bars and fired off several bursts, which whined off the tower and went on ricocheting off bars and railings. I threw myself headfirst onto the floor, and though I didn’t have time to look to see, I imagine everyone else did the same.

They completely surrounded the Circular. They then called Major Lorenzo to the main gate. Even up to the sixth floor, we could hear the officers shouting at the top of their lungs; we heard every word of the orders our comrade was to pass along to us. “Listen, tell the men that we have orders from General Headquarters to fire on anyone who comes to the windows. If anyone has clothing hung outside, it’s to be brought in immediately. We’ll give you three minutes to do so. After three minutes, nobody comes to the windows for any reason. Anyone that does will be shot immediately.”

Lorenzo was on his way up, but we intercepted him on the third floor. We surrounded him and shouted questions at him. Had they said anything else? Did we miss anything? A prisoner always does that — he pesters you to find out whether there wasn’t something left out, whether there wasn’t some meaningful gesture that might have been overlooked. But this time there was absolutely nothing left out. The officers’ shouts had been heard throughout the Circular and there was really no need at all for Lorenzo to repeat what they had said.

What followed was a very tense situation. If anybody overly curious, and there are always some, got too close to the window, the soldiers fired off a burst of machine-gun fire. Out there, gazing up vigilantly, the guards looked like hunting dogs with treed quarry, and as though to make this image even more convincing, some of them were wearing those caps with earflaps that hang down like hounds’ ears. In cells 46 and 47, which were the bathrooms, things were even more difficult. It was hard to use the bathrooms because you had to be close to the window to get to the toilet. Those who tried to go to the bathroom at first got scares they never forgot. The guards shot without the least hesitation.

That afternoon after lunch a tarpaulin-covered truck with several armed soldiers aboard, escorted by two vehicles, screeched to a stop in front of the main gate. Now during this period the prison authorities often delivered packs of cigarettes, cans of milk and sugar, and cookies or crackers acquired by prisoners’ family members in the prison canteen. The family member purchased the items, which he could not even touch, paying exorbitant prices, and then the purchase was sent in to the prisoner. A garrison truck was used for the deliveries. We had a friend, Sánchez, who was in charge of receiving the packages, putting them out in order in the prison yard, and then calling the men to pick them up. So when we saw the military truck pull up, someone as a joke called out, “Sánchez, the packages!” But it wasn’t the packages, at least not for our consumption — although they were in fact in a way destined for us.

They were boxes of Canadian-made dynamite.

The soldiers, led by Commander William Gálvez, began to unload the frightening cargo. An officer called Major Lorenzo out to tell him that the whole front part of the Circular had to be cleared, that the prisoners were to move to the back until the truck had been completely unloaded. The dynamite was to be deposited underneath the Circular, in the tunnel to the central tower and along the foundations.

That event completely changed the psychological climate of the Circular. Men speculated endlessly about the reason for the explosives. Some thought they had been deposited there to have them in a safe place, protected from attacks like that morning’s — planes would never bomb the Circulars since it was known there were prisoners inside.

About nightfall we got the first hard information through the clandestine radio. There had been fighting in the swamps of Zapata, at the Bay of Pigs, since very early that morning. The communiqués were very encouraging, and the prisoners’ euphoria knew no bounds. There were those who shouted at the top of their lungs, jumped around, and embraced their friends, possessed by a joy the reader can easily imagine — our situation had finally begun to look hopeful: And those bulletins continued.

Very early the next day, soldiers supplied with jackhammers went to work inside the tunnel leading to the central tower. They were opening niches to store the dynamite in, drilling through the thick foundations of the enormous structure. This operation now took on a macabre significance for us — the explosives could blow us sky-high.

Demolition experts arrived with the soldiers who were drilling, and we watched them unload boxes of detonators, rolls of fuse, and other equipment used for setting off explosions.

Meanwhile the communiqués from the international press kept coming in. The inmates who handled the radio never stopped to rest. They hardly slept for two days. Very early the next morning, Radio Swan, the station that transmitted to Cuba, issued a call for help from the internal resistance underground in support of the invasion:

People of Havana! Attention! People of Havana! The brave patriots of the Army of Liberation need your cooperation. Electric plants must be kept from furnishing electricity to the few industrial facilities the regime is attempting to keep in operation. This morning at seven forty-five a.m., when this station gives the signal, we ask that you turn on all the lights in your homes and connect all electrical appliances. This concerted action will increase the load on the generators in the electric plants and overload the system.

Other cables reported that the invading forces, sweeping down everything in their path, were triumphantly approaching Havana. This was false, of course; the invasion had failed.

Castro, the very man who had declared a thousand times that he was not a Communist and that “the Revolution is greener than palm trees,” had stripped off the disguise that had fooled so many people and now had proclaimed the true nature of the Revolution, the nature it had from the beginning: “This is a socialist revolution,” he said. “And we will defend it with these rifles!” And he ended his proclamation with an unmistakably Communist finale: “Long live the working class! Long live the farmers! Long live the humble! Long live the Socialist Revolution! Patria o muerte! We shall overcome!” — the demagogic phrases of a system which promises the worker, the poor, the humble his freedom, and then enchains him.

From the moment of the first attack, on the l5th, when the B-26s began bombing airports and various other places throughout the Island, the government unleashed fierce repression against everyone considered unsympathetic to the regime. Roughly half a million people were arrested throughout the country. Priests, workers, the elderly, women, soldiers, students, people from all walks of life were confined in public buildings of every sort imaginable — theaters, stadiums, government buildings, police stations, schools, and other locations — and the jails were packed to the rafters. The wholesale roundup brought into the jails hundreds of Cubans who were working in the underground, infiltrators who, once identified, were shot immediately without any trial whatsoever. Ironically, it also brought in government functionaries such as several members of the board of governors of the Banco Nacional, a Marxist elite who had been detained as they were having dinner in a restaurant and spent two days locked up.

As the jails filled, hundreds of people, including some women with children, were crammed into the prison yard of La Cabaña in the open air. There were prisoners in the moats as well, surrounded by machine guns. The only moat left free of people was the one in which the firing squads operated. In the moats of Castillo del Morro, too, a fortress in Havana, thousands of people were held for two days without food or water. At the end of the two days, the authorities turned a hose on them so they could quench their thirst.

Dozens of people died in those overcrowded conditions. Some pregnant women miscarried, and others gave birth right there on the ground, assisted by the other women. The guards threatened all and sundry with machine gunning if the invasion triumphed.

The Blanquita Theater, the largest theater in Cuba, was converted into a gigantic prison which lodged more than eight thousand people. In five days the people jammed into the theater received food on only four occasions. The Sports Palace sheltered thousands more. One night, just for kicks apparently, the militiamen guarding them began screaming for everyone to get down on the ground. They fired their machine guns over them; several people were wounded.

The persecution and repression became almost annihilation — every citizen was a potential enemy. If you weren’t in the armed forces or the militia or couldn’t prove your revolutionary militancy, you would be detained — or worse.

There is no data on the number of people shot throughout the Island during those several days, but execution squads were functioning in the regiment at Pinar del Río, on the military base at San Antonio de los Baños, in El Morro, in La Cabaña, in El Castillo de San Severino in Matanzas province, in La Campana, and in Camagüey and Oriente provinces. Often they didn’t even put the bodies into coffins — they merely stripped them and put them into plastic bags and buried them.

It was April 16,1961, in the Colón Cemetery in Havana, and as Castro was shaking the hands of the mourners for the men killed in the bombardments of the l5th, six anonymous corpses were brought in through the back gate, in silence, with no flowers, no wreaths, no family members or friends to say a few words of farewell. An officer from the Political Police and two soldiers in a white Volkswagen van picked up the corpses and carried them to an area under military control, where they were thrown into a common grave. Juan Hernández, one of the soldiers in that detail, was later sentenced to prison for conspiracy. He told us about the operation in detail. The bodies were those of men executed peremptorily as soon as the invasion began.

Emboldened by the government’s turning back the Bay of Pigs invaders, the prison authorities felt they could exercise ruthless control over us. Repression became more violent and systematic, less “occasional” — we were informed officially that the dynamite would remain in the foundations, to blow us up if there was another invasion attempt. Many prisoners simply refused to accept the fact that the dynamite was planted down there, and there were even those who said that the boxes had never contained explosives, that it was all a great charade to intimidate us and keep us in line. Others did face up to the reality of the dynamite, but they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the dynamite would be used — rather they believed it was an instrument of political blackmail. The psychological defense mechanisms at work in their minds were very complex there was a flat rejection of an infinitely threatening reality. It was, indeed, very difficult to accept the fact that we were living on top of a powder keg.

Some men dreamed up elaborate “security” measures to be taken in case worst came to worst — poor wretches grasping at anything anybody said. One guy said you had to bite down on a piece of wood so you wouldn’t burst when the dynamite exploded. So people hung pieces of wood about the thickness of a cigar around their necks; they planned to bite down on them as they flew through the air. There was an exodus to the sixth floor — many prisoners thought the farther they got from the basement, the better chance there was of escaping unharmed. Other, more realistic prisoners scratched their names and prisoner numbers on little homemade metal tags and hung them around their necks so they could at least be identified afterward.

One man, Luis Lemus, known as Americanito, decided he’d go have a look for himself. He wanted to test some of the theories, I suppose. He managed to get down into the basement by a complicated operation which involved sliding down through one of the vertical tunnels for the plumbing pipes. Someone else went to where three American CIA officers were being held, to find out what they thought about the matter; they might have a more professional opinion. These men were trained in explosives and demolition; one of them, Daniel Caswell, was really an expert. He was given all the information we had, including samples of the explosives, detonators, and so forth which Americanito had brought up from below. They came to the conclusion that everything was set to blow us up. There was a double, “fail-safe” detonation system — electrical and mechanical. There were enough explosives to reduce our building to rubble, and the same was true for the other Circulars, which had been mined with dynamite the same day ours had.

At the back of the punishment-cell pavilion some two hundred fifty to three hundred yards from the Circular, behind a little earthen bulwark, was the control hut from which the charges would be detonated. All the connections and underground plastic tubes led to that site. The explosion would be so shattering that even those who depressed the detonator handles would die, and the entire presidio would be converted into a blackened crater.

Commander García Olivera, chief of the Army Engineer Corps, and the captain from the Political Police known as Mario were the leaders of the mining operation. A group of technicians led by another soldier, a thin, gawky man called Chanito — sarcastically, “Lightning” — was in charge of checking, every day, all the machinery of death that had been installed.

This group of technicians would often walk smugly between the Circulars and make motions with their hands as though depressing the detonator, and then they would make a gesture simulating the explosion.

Those soldiers’ mission was to murder six thousand prisoners. What must they have felt? Their sadism marked them as truly mentally ill. Years later we learned that two of them wound up in an insane asylum which the Ministry of the Interior maintains for its employees. There the authorities house the military, so that no one can find out about the horrors that drove them mad.

One morning the technicians and some soldiers arrived in several trucks and began unloading boxes and taking other boxes out of the basement. They were replacing the dynamite with a surer and more powerful explosive, one which wouldn’t go off “sympathetically,” but only from an initial blast from another explosive. They filled in the tower in the prison yard with a ton of TNT, thereby converting it into a four-story fragmentation grenade of thick concrete, whose explosion would generate tremendous heat and tons of shrapnel, and produce a shock wave more than sufficient to kill us all.

A group of our men, expert in explosives themselves, set about organizing teams to try to do something to neutralize the authorities’ plans. All their energy was concentrated on deactivating the explosives. But the operation had to be discreet; not everyone could know about it, and the team members never went into much detail about what they were doing. They tried to work in secret as much as they could. But even the informers cooperated. After all, they were sure they would be blown up like everybody else; the Communists weren’t likely to come take them out of the Circulars when they decided to kill the rest of us. In order to stop leaks to the outside, a group of inmates was assigned to read all the letters, which once a month or every forty-five days, we were allowed to send. This was to keep anyone working on the project from inadvertently writing something that would give away the plan.

Americanito went on exploring the basement. He brought up samples of the fuses that had been left behind down there, and he drew up plans with the placement of the charges.

The mechanical system, using a fuse called Primacord, was the first system deactivated. The men in charge of that task did impeccable work. We knew that government technicians tested to make sure the fuse had not been cut; they picked it up at its two ends and yanked on it. If it grew taut, they assumed it was still intact, that it hadn’t been cut or tampered with. The fuse was somewhat like a garden hose — a hollow tube of insulating material filled with powdered TNT. Our deactivation team made a cut on the bottom and took out about two inches of the powder. They cleaned out this space well and put a cylindrical tube into it the same diameter as the fuse. Then they carefully sewed up the cut. The fuse lay on the ground, so when they applied a little dirt to the seam, the alteration was perfectly camouflaged. If the authorities tried to use this fuse, it would be interrupted and the detonators would not go off.

The electrical detonation system was much more complicated. Basically, it was neutralized by an electrical bridge which detoured the current, a sort of short circuit.

Nonetheless, all these measures, assuming they worked according to our plans, would give us only a few minutes, because when the authorities saw that the TNT didn’t explode, that we weren’t flying into the air in pieces, they would try some other way to do away with us. All they would have to do was fire cannons at any of the Circulars, since every one of them was still a powder keg. And so for those few moments left us, our action groups had organized a second-stage plan. They partially cut through some windows so that just a few quick strokes would sever them completely. They also took off the grating, almost a yard square, from one of the entrances to the drains and excavated a tunnel that ran underneath the foundations and came out several yards away from the Circulars, but they didn’t remove the last few inches of dirt at the exit. Many of the TNT sticks were half emptied, and homemade grenades were fabricated with fuses made out of match heads.

Although all the work in our Circular was well conceived, well planned, and well executed, if the men in the Circular next to us didn’t do the same things, nothing would come of it. If one of the huge powder kegs exploded; it would be enough to set off the adjoining ones.

No one could tell whether the work that had been carried out would produce the results we hoped for. There was, however, absolutely no doubt about the authorities’ criminal intentions. After a great deal of effort, we managed to leak the news about what they had planned to the outside world. In Miami, articles were published about the government’s monstrous plans. But all our pleas and the pleas of our families to international organizations, especially the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, were futile. Nobody paid the least attention to the act of barbarism which the Cuban government had laid plans for. There was not a single voice raised in protest.