A TRIP

Hiram Prado and I undertook a somewhat difficult trip through the Island and went as far as Guantánamo. We traveled in a run-down train, which stopped in every town and sometimes backed up to the point of departure. At one of the stops we saw a lot of oranges scattered on the ground, possibly fallen off a truck. We jumped through the train window, eager to eat those oranges; we were ravenously hungry. There was a fierce struggle with all the other passengers who had also jumped from the train, just as desperate to get at the fruit.

The train was full of recruits; everybody was sexually aroused and having sex in the bathrooms, under the seats, anyplace. Hiram used his foot to masturbate a recruit who seemed to be sleeping on the floor. I was lucky enough to be able to use both hands.

It was an extraordinary trip. In Santiago de Cuba we would spend the night under bridges and in culverts. One night we went to sleep on the rear seat of a bus at an intercity terminal, assuming the bus would be there at least two or three days. When we woke up the next day, we were in El Caney, many miles from Santiago, and we had no idea how to get back.

A certain erotic rebelliousness pervaded our youth. I see myself naked under a bridge in Santiago de Cuba with a young recruit, also completely naked, while cars crossed over the bridge at full speed, shining their headlights on us. Hiram Prado left Santiago in the back of a truck with a black man, and a few minutes out of town he was already sucking his cock while the truck moved at top speed on the highway. I can imagine the surprise of the peasants at the spectacle displayed in that truck.

To get to a beach was like entering paradise because all the young people wanted to make love, and there were always dozens of them ready to go into the bushes. Many young men made love with me in the changing stalls of La Concha public beach, desperate with the knowledge that this instant was, perhaps, unique and had to be enjoyed to the fullest, because at any moment the police could come and arrest us. After all, those of us who were not yet in a concentration camp were privileged; we had to take advantage of our freedom. We looked for men everywhere and we found them.

On our erotic adventure, Hiram and I went as far as the Isle of Pines, where we could enjoy entire regiments. The recruits, desperate for sex, woke up the entire camp when we arrived. The young men, covered with blankets or naked, came to meet us. We would go into some abandoned tanks and cause a terrible commotion.

One day we began to take inventory of the men we had slept with until then; this was sometime in 1968. I came to the conclusion, after complicated mathematical calculations, that I had sex with about five thousand men. Hiram arrived at approximately the same figure. Of course, Hiram and I were not the only ones carried away by this kind of erotic rage; everybody was: the recruits who spent long months of abstinence, and the whole population.

I remember a speech by Fidel Castro in which he took it upon himself to lecture men on how they should dress. At the same time, he also criticized the young men who had long hair and roamed the streets playing the guitar. All dictatorships are sexually repressive and anti-life. All affirmations of life are diametrically opposed to dogmatic regimes. It was logical for Fidel Castro to persecute us, not to let us fuck, and to try to suppress any public display of the life force.