THE ARREST

I thought that my predicament had reached its limit, but if there is a lesson to be learned under a totalitarian system, it is that calamities never seem to end. In the summer of 1973 Pepe Malas and I were bathing at Guanabo Beach. We had sex in the mangroves with some young guys and really enjoyed ourselves with them.

After making love, we left our beach bags in the sand and went back into the water. Within a half hour we realized we had been robbed; our recent lovers had taken our bags. Pepe called the police, and this should never have been done in our case. The patrol car drove us along the beach to see if we could find the thieves. We did indeed find them, as well as our beach bags, in a pine grove near the shore.

The police arrested them and the matter was clear-cut: they were caught with the stolen property. We had to go to the police station, which was ill-advised in this situation. If you live in a country such as this, any contact with the police is best avoided. The young guys arrived in a very good mood and said, “These are a couple of queers who tried to fondle us; they touched our pricks. We took their bags because when we beat them up, they fled. We were on our way to the police station to return them.” The story was not credible, but we were obviously homosexual, and the boys had an uncle who was a cop at the Guanabo police station. So, from accusers we had turned into the accused, and that night we were already under arrest and slept at the police station.

I was naive enough to think the boys had no proof against us, and if anything could be proven, it was that they had robbed us. But I had overlooked a Castroist article of law stating that in the case of a homosexual committing a sexual crime, anyone’s accusation was enough grounds for prosecution. Not only were legal proceedings brought against us, but we were taken to the Guanabo jail.

The UNEAC report was very damaging for me. All of a sudden, everything positive had disappeared from my file, and I was nothing but a homosexual counterrevolutionary who had dared to publish books abroad.

We were released on bail. I remember that Tomasito La Goyesca took care of getting the cash, which would not have been easy for us because we had to pay four hundred pesos and neither of us had that kind of money. When we were out on the street we continued to hope we would be acquitted; the whole thing was completely absurd, and there was no evidence against us.

I still had to go to UNEAC, of course, to sign the register and collect my salary, though every day I was given dirty looks as if I had the plague; and now, as the final blow, I had a trial pending. Suddenly, it seemed I had become invisible; not even the door guards greeted me as I walked in; it didn’t make any difference that some of them were also gay.

I had appointed a lawyer to handle my case. He told me not to worry; there really was no proof against me, and there was no crime they could accuse me of. But one afternoon he called me, rather nervous, and asked me to see him at his home. He pulled out an intimidating dossier of evidence against me, including a list of titles and descriptions of all the novels I had published abroad. That lengthy report, in which I was accused of being a counterrevolutionary who had smuggled all his books out of Cuba without UNEAC’s authorization, was signed by people who, apparently up to that moment, had been excellent friends of mine and only recently were patting me on the back, telling me not to worry, nothing would happen to me. Among those who signed it, accusing me of constant counterrevolutionary activities, were Nicolás Guillén, Otto Fernández, José Martínez Matos, and Bienvenido Suárez.

Evidently, I was no longer being accused of just a common crime, a public scandal, as the original arrest records showed. Now I was a counterrevolutionary engaged in incessant propaganda against the regime, which I published abroad. Everything had been set up in order to convict me. The district attorney, in his provisional conclusions, said that my crimes warranted eight years in jail.

Pepe Malas’s case had been separated from mine in a strange way; he was accused only of causing a minor public disturbance. His name scarcely appeared in the proceedings.

My aunt, naturally, knew all about it. She had also submitted a long report for the courts, informing on my depraved life-style and my counterrevolutionary activities. There was no escape.

Olga, Miguel’s wife, was returning to Paris shortly and perhaps for the last time, because she was also afraid that, at some point, they would no longer let her out of Cuba. I told her all about my problems. She said that once in Paris, she would contact my friends Jorge and Margarita Camacho, and my publisher. They would find some way to smuggle me out of the country. I told her that I was in immediate danger of being arrested before my trial, that it would be better for me to flee than to have to stand trial. I would hide somewhere and send Olga a telegram saying, “Send the flower book.” They could send an inflatable boat, a false passport with my photograph in it, and diving gear—something I could use to escape from the country.

These, to be sure, were farfetched hopes, born of despair, but hope is, after all, mostly for the desperate. I did not want to resign myself to imprisonment. Before Olga left, I quickly typed my poem “To Die in June, Gasping for Air”—I had given the draft to some friends who are still in Cuba—as well as “Leper Colony,” which begins with my experience in the Guanabo jail. Olga smuggled these long poems out.

I knew a beautiful black guy with whom I frequently made love amid the shrubbery of Monte Barreto. I could no longer make love in my aunt’s house because she had threatened to call the police. To be mounted by that man, naked and surrounded by nature, with the smell of fresh grass around us, was actually more exciting than it would have been in bed. I told him what was happening to me, and he asked me to meet him the next day at the beach; from there we would go to Guantánamo, and he would help me escape through the naval base.

That night I met Hiram Prado and Pepe Malas. I told Hiram about my decision to leave the country in a boat via the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo. Confiding my plans was, unquestionably, an act of extreme naïveté; in Cuba you cannot tell secrets to anybody. The next day I got up very early. I had already given my typewriter to the Abreu brothers, and they had provided me with some money for the trip to Guantánamo. The police, however, had gotten up even earlier.

I heard a knock at the door and went out on the balcony to take a look. Several cops had surrounded the house; they came in and arrested me at once. I was treated with unnecessary violence. They beat me, stripped me to see if I had any weapons, made me dress again, and escorted me to the patrol car. As I was getting into the car, my aunt opened the door; I saw her radiant face and expression of complicity as she looked at the cops who were arresting me.

They locked me up in a cell with twenty other people at the Miramar police station. Before being jailed, I was questioned briefly; major interrogations would come later. The questioner asked me why I had been arrested. I told him that I did not know, that I was free on bail and, therefore, my arrest was illegal. That was enough for the interrogator to beat me up.