Читать книгу Against All Hope - Armando Valladares - Страница 19

12

PREPARATIONS FOR AN ESCAPE

After the failure of the Bay of Pigs, Boitel, Ulises, and I sat down to analyze our situation, and we came to the conclusion that the Revolution would remain in power for many long years. Yet, that view of the matter left us with only one thing to do — try to escape. That idea, that dream, lies in the heart of every prisoner. It’s an idea not all prisoners rise to, not for lack of decision or courage alone, but rather because very specific factors hold them back — their families, the scant possibility of success, and the great possibility of dying. And there are, of course, those prisoners who simply resign themselves to their fate and sit down to await the outcome; those are the majority in every jail in the world.

From the moment we conceived the idea of escaping, our minds were constantly at work on a way to realize the faint dream. Each of us thought about how it ought to come off. There were days of intense consultations; one of us would propose a plan and the others would pick it to pieces. We discarded cutting through the barbed wire in the classical manner, using a pair of strong pliers to cut through the steel, chain-link fence and escaping through the breach. The escape could not involve violence, either, since then the chance of success was substantially reduced. It had to be as simple and easy as possible, so as not to arouse suspicion.

During the planning stage, I was in charge of mapping the surrounding area. I was to locate on a map, as precisely as I could, the roads, elevations, guardposts, and whatever other details might come into play at the time of the escape. Even though from the fifth floor you could see for many miles all around, we managed to find a prisoner who had accompanied Batista’s children when they traveled abroad, a man named Tasi, who we understood had a telescope made right there in the prison from lenses that someone had smuggled in. With the aid of the little telescope, I spent hours both during the day and at night closely observing our surroundings. Little by little, I added new details to the map — the little militia encampments to the northwest and the Cossack guardpost on the other side of the military cordon, among the pines, which could be made out only because of the glow of the cigarettes they lighted at night.

Over and above the physical details, I familiarized myself with the routine and movements of the garrison. The prisoner gatekeeper was authorized to wear a watch, and we persuaded him to lend it to us. It was a tremendous help; with it I could measure how long it would take a soldier to go from the little guardhouse to the last guard hut which could be seen, or to a house just beyond the fence to the east, beyond the little stand of pines, where another guard hut was tucked away. It was at this house that the guards’ uniforms were washed and ironed. You could almost always see long clotheslines with olive-green uniforms flapping in the wind. The house became very important, since it gave us a plausible way to escape from the prison.

The preparations for an escape generate a tremendous amount of activity. A thousand details have to be taken care of, each one of vital importance in its own right. Another of the common prisoners who sometimes collaborated with us gave us invaluable help. We got in touch with him because we needed contacts on the outside, friends and relatives of Boitel and Ulises who could furnish certain articles we needed. You needed some luck, too, and some came our way. While our planning was going on, the Director-General of Jails and Prisons, in an act of “generosity,” decided to permit us two visits a year, one in June and one in September. That was a real piece of news for the presidio, but for us, and our escape plans, it was a blessing.

Pieces of information we would need were fed to us by some of the common prisoners. Boitel was the one who took charge of those contacts. I was in charge of vigilance and other details, as I’ve mentioned. I’ll speak about Ulises’ responsiblities in a moment. There was a fourth man, Benjamín Brito, who would go with us as our guide and navigator. Brito was a sailor, an expert in everything connected with the sea, and he was doubly valuable because he knew the swamps of the Island. He had been a caiman hunter in that area for years. Besides Brito’s knowledge of the Island, we were fortunate to have, from the common prisoners, a detailed map of Isla de Pinos with topographical and elevation isobars, rivers, and creeks marked on it, and also indicating the swampy regions.

Measuring time with the watch and counting the guards’ steps, I put together a table of distances and times between one point and another — as for example from one guardpost to the main guardhouse, from the guardhouse to our Circular, and so on. The hours of the changing of the guards were also very important, since if an escape was to be attempted a short while after the guard had come on duty, it ran the risk of being stymied because the relief would be wide awake and watchful. Quite the contrary if the escape took place toward the end of a shift when the guard was tired and ready to go in — his watch-fulness then would not be so sharp, he would pay less attention. The only thing he would be thinking about would be his replacement.

I knew that between the little guard huts there was a distance of about fifty yards, so guiding myself by this fact, I observed several soldiers to get an average time for a fifty-yard walk. Then, once that number was known, I could estimate other times for known distances, and other distances from known times. I rechecked my calculations — for time and distance from the main guardhouse to the house where the clothes were washed, for example — both by the time a guard actually took and by the fact that I knew the distance between one point and the other was approximately four hundred yards.

The barbed-wire fences had a watch it would be fatal to take lightly. Every fifty yards, there was a guard hut, equipped with spotlights, with an armed sentinel stationed inside. The two endmost guard huts, at the front and the back of the prison, were taller and armed with machine guns. The chain-link fences had been restored in 1960. They were erected on deep concrete foundations, which had trenches dug in front of them; the fences were topped with metal Vs which carried ten or twelve barbed-wire strands. After six o’clock in the evening, a guard jeep made uninterrupted patrols outside the presidio, traveling always parallel to the barbed wire, as another one did the same inside.

We decided to escape dressed as militiamen. The decision was virtually inevitable for several reasons: they were the ones constantly going in and out of the presidio; there were several militia encampments in the surrounding area; and it would be much easier to get lost among them than among the soldiers from the regular garrison. The militia uniform we would need consisted of a pair of olive-green pants, a blue shirt, a black beret, a military web belt, also olive-green, and black boots. Ulises was put in charge of the uniforms.

We needed militia shirts and berets above all. The khaki-colored pants from the old army were the uniforms we always wore, and it was easy enough to dye them olive-green. Many of those pants, from having been constantly worn and washed, had lost the letter P that had been stenciled on them. The military belts were part of the prisoners’ uniforms anyway, and we already had the boots. We also needed hacksaw blades to cut through the bars, Cuban and American money, a first-aid kit, knives, water-purifying tablets, and a whole list of other little things.

While I was gathering my information, we got two lenses for a more powerful telescope. We made the tube out of cardboard pasted together with glue made from macaroni. We dyed the tube inside with soot and smoke given off by burning kerosene we got sometimes to kill bedbugs with. The telescope was made so you could take it apart, and I always took the precaution of not leaving it assembled if I wasn’t using it. Hiding the lenses was very easy — when we were finished using them, we simply dropped them into a pail of water. Even if there was a search, however much they looked the guards couldn’t find them.

At last the day of the visit was upon us. Twelve hundred prisoners were to receive family members at the same time and in the same place, in the corral a hundred yards square with its high barbed-wire fence. In 1960, General Headquarters had permitted one visit, but this new visit really was unprecedented because of the number of inmates and family members who would come together.

The eve of the visit made me aware of some startling ways veteran prisoners prepared to meet their families. I heard one of our neighbors in an adjoining cell say he had to iron his uniform for the visit. I did a double-take — there were no irons there, or even electricity, nothing of the kind. I asked him how he proposed to iron his clothes under those conditions, and he smiled at me and said he’d show me — a friend of his was already doing the ironing up on the fourth floor.

When we arrived, I saw how they went about it. The iron was an aluminum canteen cup to which they’d nailed a heavy wooden handle. They put plastic bags inside, all rolled up and knotted, and set them afire. This produced high temperatures in the canteen cup, which they ran over the clothing to iron it. Through a long, laborious process, they also extracted starch from macaroni. Some men ironed with bottles full of hot water. The efforts of these men was admirable, but I told myself that if that was the way to go elegantly dressed to the visit, I without a doubt would never be able to manage it. I contented myself with putting my pants carefully on top of the canvas of the cot and then some blankets on top of that, and sleeping on the pile. This method of “ironing” was the most popular among the prisoners.

Many people’s nerves had a profound effect on their digestive system, so it seemed there were never enough bathrooms just before a visit. There were many people who did not ordinarily have stomach or digestive problems but had them unfailingly the day before a visit.

Boitel, Ulises, and I had made up three minuscule notes, all three identical, to try to get at least one of them through the search. In the note we asked Boitel’s outside contacts to send us the things we needed for the escape and explained how to get them to us. We also asked them to make arrangements for a boat to pick us up on the coast at a certain place, day, and hour. We could confirm this last on the next visit. And we asked for an answer. The notes were in code; we were to furnish the key aloud to the person we gave the notes to. The key was a single word of five letters — it was unforgettable, since it was the last name of the Maestro, the Apostle of Cuban Independence: Martí.³

The main city of Isla de Pinos, Nueva Gerona, is located several miles from the prison. A road running from the town crosses the Las Casas River and comes right to the door of the prison. The hotel capacity of Nueva Gerona and its environs was very limited; there were two little hotels and several small guest houses. But some four thousand visitors had arrived for that visit in June. They slept in parks, in doorways, right in the middle of the street. Beginning the afternoon of the day before the visit, they came to the gates of the prison and formed enormously long lines, carrying the little packages of food they had been authorized to bring. They waited there through the night.

Starting early in the morning, we were up out of bed, standing in lines for the latrines, shaving, getting everything ready. We went over our clothes carefully, looking for bedbugs and lice so we could get them out of the clothes. These disgusting creatures were an ineradicable plague. There were millions of them. That entire gigantic building, all six floors of it, was full of bedbugs. We struggled against them constantly, but they hid in the most unexpected places — the soles of shoes, belt buckles, the seams of clothing. The walls of many cells had lost their cement outer layer, and the bricks underneath had holes full of these tiny little bugs. But in truth not everyone tried to exterminate them. It didn’t matter very much to some men. They would fall exhausted onto their cots, and although throngs of the insects began to suck their blood, the men didn’t even wake up. When the bedbugs were full, they moved very sluggishly, so the prisoner, dead asleep, would turn over in bed, squash them, and the next day the canvas covering of the cot would be covered with bloodstains. The blood sucked out by bedbugs gives off a characteristic piercing, sickening odor. On some walls, you could see a dark stain about the size of an egg. If you touched it, it would disperse in all directions. It would be a colony of thousands of bedbugs.

To combat them, there were two preferred methods — there was kerosene, which was especially difficult to get hold of, or there was washing the cot with a brush, scrubbing the seams of the covering. The cots with burlap were a trial for the prisoners and a real paradise for the bedbugs, which were camouflaged by the dark fabric; since they were so tiny it was almost impossible to make them out. When a solution of water and detergent was applied to them, they died immediately in that characteristic way of theirs — they stiffen, then arch their bodies, and then they quiver and die. But getting detergent was not easy either. Instead, after washing the cot, you could rub a piece of soap back and forth over the seams, coating them with a paste of the soap. The bedbugs hated the smell of the soap we used. Therefore some prisoners, when the guards were about to make a sweep of the cells, would lay down a barrier of soap around their cells by rubbing the bar across the floor. That way bedbugs from adjoining cells would not cross the “magic circle” and invade their own. Old campesinos used still another method — they put stems or veins of tobacco leaves down, since the odor of tobacco also drove the bedbugs off. There were men who kept some sense of black humor, and they would say it made them sad to kill the bedbugs because they were blood of their blood.

Appeals to the prison authorities to fumigate the cells bore no fruit for the almost ten years I was there, so that on top of all the other sufferings we had to go through was that plague. The bedbug bites were terrible for me, since I was allergic to their bites; they formed large welts which lasted for days.

At seven o’clock in the morning, the platoon of guards that would search us before we went out to the visit finally arrived at the front gate. The gatekeeper told all the inmates to start getting ready because in a few minutes the guards would start calling off men from the lists.

The first prisoners were going out. They had to strip completely. The guards then carefully went over the men’s clothing seam by seam, the cuffs of their pants, the double seams of their flies. They stuck their hands into their shoes, looking for notes. They did the same with their socks. They orderd the men to raise their arms and checked their armpits. When the search was over, the prisoners dressed again and went out toward the corral. Six or eight guards were posted all along the walk, but this time the prisoners didn’t run in terror.

Ulises, Boitel, and I crowded together next to the bars at the exit to see how the others were searched. If they did a search on me like the ones I was watching, I would have no problem. When my turn came, I was nervous, but the hidden note was very difficult to find. I had packed it flat so there was hardly any bulge, into a heat-sealed plastic protector. Ulises was searched at the same time I was. Since we were being called out in alphabetical order, not by prisoner number, Boitel had been one of the first ones through, and he hadn’t had any problem. When the guard turned my clothes over to me, I breathed a deep sigh of relief. The search had been thorough, but not sufficient. The notes had gotten through, taped under our testicles.