by Lee Jackson
“What do you think?” he asked. The man did not respond, but stared vacantly at the ominous round cellblocks. In silence, they trudged under the harsh commands of their guards to one marked Circular 4, which would house the newest cargo of “fresh meat.” In its cavernous interior, a single watchtower rose five stories from the center, and a mass of humanity moved on every conceivable inch on the ground floor, as well as on each tier.
Access was firmly secured at the base of the interior watchtower. From that perch, Atcho saw that four armed guards observed every cell on every floor that ringed the outside walls. Already thirty-seven years old and having housed generations of prisoners, the building’s stench of effluent tropical dankness, and decades without proper cleaning stung Atcho’s nostrils. He felt the visceral press of multitudes of dirty human bodies in close proximity.
When the doors closed behind them, the guards who had escorted them stayed outside. A tall muscular inmate wearing a blue prison uniform approached the new group. “I am Javier,” he growled. “I am appointed by the prison warden to govern inside Circular 4.” He pointed to several other men in blue prison uniforms. “Those are my assistants. They will show you how things work here. Meanwhile, you’ve each been assigned a cell and a work group. Don’t give me any trouble.” He paused. “Your fellow inmates here,” he waved his hand to indicate the hundreds of prisoners milling about, “they think that they should not wear these blue uniforms, like mine.” He indicated his own. “They were already complaining earlier today. They think that because they are political prisoners that makes them better than us.” He leered at them and exchanged grins with his cohorts. “Don’t think it!” he snapped at the prisoners. “Now,” he looked over them, “I’m going to divide you into work groups, and you start work tomorrow morning.”
Moments later, Atcho stood with a group of young men roughly his own age. They were designated for the marble quarries. He stood awaiting further instruction when he heard a commotion off to his right. Suddenly, an old man, very skinny and bent over, walked deliberately up in front of Javier. He was dressed only in his underwear, and he carried his blue uniform in his arms. “These Circulars were built for nine hundred prisoners!” he yelled angrily. “There must be twice that many in here.” He threw the uniforms at Javier’s feet. “I will not wear these clothes of criminals!” He spat onto the floor. “I am not a common thief like you. I will not be ruled by criminals!”
Javier looked startled, then his face darkened with fury. The entire cavernous interior had gone quiet with only a murmur coming from a few who had not sensed the unfolding drama. On the watchtower, the guards moved uneasily, weapons pointed in the direction of Javier and the old man. Atcho tensed. Another prisoner walked in front of Javier and threw down his uniform, then a third, and a fourth. Within seconds, roughly twenty prisoners, clad in only their tattered, grimy underwear, stood defiantly in front of Javier, looking alternately between him and the guards in the watchtower.
Atcho saw one guard speak into a telephone. Moments later, the outside door swung open, and a band of guards rushed in. They grabbed the old man and began beating him, then dragged him outside.
“Silencio!” Javier yelled above the din. More prisoners quickly drowned him out as they stripped off their uniforms and threw them down. Around the walls, yet more inmates angrily left their cells and descended the narrow concrete stairs, stripping their uniforms off as they came.
Javier’s “assistants” drew close to him. On the watchtower, Atcho saw the same guard once again speak into the telephone. Atcho stepped quickly into the shadows to one side of Javier, and delivered two sharp blows, one to his stomach, the other directly into the bridge between his eyes. He heard a crack of bone, and Javier went down. The entire motion took barely a second, and Atcho stepped further into the shadows.
When Javier’s men saw him go down, they grouped around and helped him move toward the exit, encircled by the furious crowd of prisoners. At that moment, a shaft of sunlight broke through the doorway, and more guards rushed in. They grabbed Javier and his men, and made a quick exit, closing and locking the heavy iron door behind them.
Inside, the noise died rapidly, and all eyes turned towards the watchtower. One guard was still on the phone, but the others were spread out so that they had full rifle coverage of the interior. The guard on the telephone replaced the receiver, and picked up a bullhorn. “Go back to your cells!” His voice was half authoritative and half wavering. “Go back to your cells! Now!”
The crowd began dispersing, each individual headed toward his few square feet of space. Atcho nudged one of the men in his underwear. “Where do I go?” he asked. “I just got here.” The man looked at him through sagging eyes. He did not respond, nor did he start walking. He seemed lost in thought. Then, he turned, faced the tower, and called up.
“Oye me! Listen to me!” he yelled. At first, no one seemed to hear him, so he called again. “Guardia! Oye me!” Movement stopped, and one of the guards peered down.
“What do you want? More trouble?”
“You tell your jefe that we will not be governed by criminals. We are educated men who never broke the law, and we will govern ourselves, or you will have to shoot us all!” He paused, and then yelled again, “And we won’t wear the uniforms of criminals!”
Around him, other prisoners looked at him in awe and fear. “You go too far,” one said quietly.
“No!” he responded vehemently. “They’ve already taken everything away from us. I will either keep my dignity or die with it!” He set his jaw firmly. Around him, a small group gathered. It grew until every man in the Circular 4 had descended to the first floor and stood packed together in their underwear, facing the watchtower defiantly. Atcho had also stripped down, but he moved further into the shadows.
The guard with the bullhorn spoke into the phone again. A moment later, he lifted the bullhorn, and called down, “The warden will meet with your representatives tonight. Now, go back to your cells!” He lowered the bullhorn and picked up his weapon.
A few minutes later, with help from other prisoners, Atcho located his assigned cell, and lay down on the canvas stretched over a steel frame that served as his bed. The walls were rough-hewn and coated with worn-through, grimy whitewash. The bars had also been painted white at some point in its old history, but that had also worn through to shiny steel by thousands of hands that had gripped them over many decades. The cells had doors, but they were left unlocked, and inmates were free to move about. Twice each day, there was a head count, and prisoners then had to be in their cells where they could be seen and counted by the guards in the watchtower.
Atcho said little to anyone that night. One of his cellmates, Domingo, had been an engineer prior to the revolution, and had also been captured at the Bay of Pigs. “What will happen now?” Atcho asked, referring to the commotion.
Domingo was small, in his mid-thirties, and appeared to be a thoughtful man. “I don’t know,” he responded. “You can tell by how quiet it is now that people are worried. But they can’t kill us all! There are famous people in here. If they massacre us, the world will know.”
The next morning before breakfast, Atcho milled with his work group on the ground floor of the cellblock waiting to go for breakfast, and was surprised to see that the cadre of criminals was not present. Instead, a fellow prisoner stood at the base of the watchtower and called for quiet.
“The warden brought me and some others to his office last night,” he announced in a loud, serious tone. “We govern ourselves!” As the crowd began to voice its approval, he raised his right hand for quiet. “We don’t celebrate,” he said. “We are still prisoners. But here,” he tapped his head, “and here,” he put his hand over his heart, “we are still freemen – and they will never take that away.” The crowd raised its collective voice again, and again he raised his hand. “To celebrate is to invite retribution,” he cautioned. “We will do as we always have: conduct ourselves with dignity and look out for each other.” He smil
ed softly. “I wish I had something better to say in closing, but,” he indicated the outer heavy iron doors opening and guards waiting for them, “have a good day at work.”
With that, the prisoners started to disperse to their work groups, but one man called out, “What about our clothes?”
The leader laughed. “Ah sí, las ropas – the clothes. Well, today, we work in our underwear. Tonight, we will receive back clothes taken from us on arrival.” He laughed again. “You might not get back exactly the same clothes, but you’ll still look better than in your underwear. You might have to do some trading to get something that fits.” With that, he left.
Atcho looked across the crowd as he filed out with his work group to meet the guards waiting for them, who would shepherd them to the marble quarries. He felt a nudge on his elbow. Turning, he found the man who had rallied the prisoners the night before. “I saw what you did,” the man said quietly. “I told the leaders. We’ll be in touch.” He started to leave, but Atcho stopped him.
“Wait! What happened to the old man who was beaten?”
The man looked tiredly at Atcho, and his eyes moistened. He said simply, “He was my friend,” shook his head, turned, and walked away.
Atcho trudged with his group. His eyes hurt in the sunlight after having been in the half-light of Circular 4 for the last ten hours. In the center of the compound was the massive mess hall. As he entered, Atcho could not help being awed by the incredible size of the round structure. It was not as tall as the other Circulars, but its diameter was much larger, and with all the men from the prison moving in and out at roughly the same time, the din was loud, and carrying on a conversation was all but impossible.
“Sometimes we meet family in here,” an inmate yelled to him.
“How?”
“The guards make them listen to a speech about how great Castro is and what will happen to them if they don’t obey rules. They are searched, and then just pushed into here to find their family members.”
“But I thought that they only get to visit for an hour.”
The man shrugged. “True, and it takes at least half an hour to find each other.” Atcho looked down at his plate in silence. His breakfast was watery cornmeal gruel. There was plenty of it, but he noticed lumps in the slop, and started poking at them. He looked around. The prisoners who had been there longer were picking items from the gruel and tossing them on the floor. He gagged as he recognized pieces of cockroaches, soap …
“What is that?” he asked a man sitting next to him.
The man grinned. “Horse penis,” he yelled back. “The guards throw this stuff in there. Toss it out, but you’ve got to eat – that’s all there is, and you have to take some of it with you for lunch. If we’re lucky, it won’t spoil in the hot sun before we get to eat it.”
Atcho stared blankly at the man. He was in his early twenties, and had a gaunt look of someone who had already suffered debilitating conditions for an extended time. Whether he was tall or not was difficult to tell because of a permanent stoop. His skin was dark and leathery from apparent long hours in the sun. His jet-black hair was laced with dirt and showing signs of gray. Despite sarcasm in his tone, he carried a wide, friendly smile. “I am Leon.” He held out his hand, and Atcho shook it without enthusiasm. “You just got here, no?” Atcho nodded dully. “So then were you in the fighting?” Again, Atcho nodded. “What happened?” Leon asked. “Why did the resistance fail?”
Atcho shook his head. “We’ll probably never know.”
Leon leaned over and put his mouth close to Atcho’s ear. “People know who you are,” he said. “Atcho, some of us saw what you did last night, to Javier.” Atcho glanced up sharply. “Sorry to tell you so soon, but we never know how much time we’ll have to talk.”
Atcho ate as much as he could stomach. Within minutes, they trooped back outside, formed with their work groups, and began the trek to the marble quarries. Leon stayed close to Atcho, and as they started out, he said, “Don’t worry, no one will tell. We are honored that you are among us.”
A guard bellowed. “Hey you, stop talking!” He was not a large man, but his rifle was loaded and his bayonet sharp. The prisoners plodded along.
After a while, when it seemed that conversation had started between other prisoners, Atcho asked, “How is the work at the quarries?”
“I won’t lie,” Leon replied, furtively. “It’s rough. We do everything by hand with picks and sledgehammers. They make young prisoners do it because the work is hard and they are trying to break us.” He looked back at the guard. “They think that if they can kill our spirits, the other prisoners will see and be easier to manage. But always, we resist. The work strengthens resolve. When they push us harder, we slow down – we become plantadas, unyielding. And they know if they push us too hard, we’ll just stop. They can’t kill us all.” Atcho recalled that Domingo had told him the same thing last night. “But you still have to be careful, because the guards are untrained and they can be arbitrary.”
“I told you to stop talking!” the guard yelled. When Atcho turned, he saw that the guard was only a few feet away. The man lunged with his bayonet and plunged it into Leon’s left buttock. Leon screamed and fell to the ground.
While the other guards circled in close vicinity, the attacker stood over Leon using his weight to drive the bayonet further in, and when he felt bone, he turned it. Leon writhed in pain, and after a moment, the guard pulled the bayonet out, creating a sucking noise. A huge volume of blood spurted, drenching the guard and spraying those nearby, including Atcho.
Stunned, Atcho stared. The entire action had taken only seconds. On the ground, Leon writhed, while blood poured out of him into a bright pool. Other prisoners moved around, aghast. “Get him some help!” someone cried. The guards only moved to tighten their perimeter around Leon. The attacker whirled to face the prisoners. His expression was one of fascination and glee. It mixed with consternation as he confronted the hostility evident on the prisoners’ faces. He looked at Atcho. “Do you see what you caused?” he said, grinning.
Atcho reeled. Immediate guilt swept over him.
“We need to stop the bleeding!” someone else called.
“We’ll get him help,” the lead guard said matter-of-factly to no one in particular. “Now get to work.” He detailed a guard to stay with Leon and sent another for medical help while he and the other guards herded the work group to the marble quarries.
A pall hung over Circular 4 when Atcho and his work group arrived back at the end of the workday. Without inquiry, he knew that word had spread about what had happened to Leon. Given the deliberately slow pace at which the guards had gone for help, Atcho knew Leon’s fate. He had bled out among the weeds.
“It’s not your fault,” someone told him. “Sometimes they let us talk, sometimes not. It’s arbitrary. They might prod with the bayonet sometimes, but,” he shook his head, “that one’s crazy.”
Atcho learned later that suicides were rare among political prisoners despite the torture. That night, as he was sitting in his fourth tier cell, he saw a body plunge from above and heard it hit the floor below. The man had been Leon’s cellmate, and a close friend of the old man beaten to death the night before. Atcho reflected that he had been at El Presidio Modelo for less than twenty-four hours, and in that time, he had witnessed the deaths of three men.
Every day in the quarries, prisoners suffered physical torment. The jarring of Atcho’s muscles and joints with every blow he delivered with a sledgehammer and pick to the hard, raw marble kept him in constant, often excruciating, pain and his ears rang with the constant clang of metal on rock. But his muscles also hardened, and as Leon had told him, reinforced his determination. The sweltering heat turned his skin into leather and lined his face.
Isabel and his life before the Bay of Pigs seemed now distant memories.
From the time of his capture to his transfer to the island prison, Atcho had found no chance to escape. Then one evening a few days after h
is arrival in Circular 4, a man paid Atcho a visit in his cell. He was the prisoner who had stood up to the guards. When he entered, Atcho’s cellmates greeted him warmly and respectfully, then, moments later, vacated.
“My friends call me Jujo,” he said, extending his hand. He was a man of normally medium build, but the ravages of prison had taken their toll. Grizzled like everyone else, he was also balding on top. Gray, feathery strands of hair fell around his neck. He had been a literature professor in Havana. They spoke for a while.
“We know who you are, Atcho.”
Startled, Atcho said nothing for a moment. “How do people know me? Leon said the same thing just before he was attacked.”
Jujo smile softly. “Atcho, you were better known around Cuba than you might have thought. A West Point graduate from Cuba is very rare. You are the only one – well, and your father before you. I am so sorry for your loss.” Atcho acknowledged the sentiment. “When you graduated,” Jujo went on, “the news was on the front page of newspapers with your picture. President Batista called you a national treasure.” Noting Atcho’s concern, he continued, “Your exploits with that tank at the Bay of Pigs are well known, the stuff of legend, and more than a few of us saw you take out Javier that day.” He laughed softly. “I might only know about literature, but I can still add two and two, and I remember the photos I saw of you.”
Atcho shook his head. “I need to keep my identity as much a secret as possible.” He told Jujo about Captain Govorov and Isabel. “I don’t want my family to know I am alive. If everyone thinks me dead, I have a better chance of escaping and finding her.”
Jujo listened intently, thought a moment, and then said, “Atcho, I don’t think you have to worry. Only a few people have probably heard much about this, and we can let the story die. If it comes up among prisoners, we’ll say it was mistaken identity. Even if they don’t believe us, they won’t ask questions. Men have died in here protecting each other, and you’re not the only one whose identity needs to be hidden. Now.” He shifted his body. “You mentioned escape. That’s what I came to talk to you about.”
