AN “OPEN” JAIL
We arrived at a so-called open prison in Flores, next to Miramar. Torres signaled and whispered something to the guard. We entered, and they gave me a new mattress and uniform. The jailhouse was by the ocean and there was even a small seawall where one could walk and sit; it was a considerable improvement.
I was able to take a shower on a wooden platform above the sea. I opened my mouth to let the water run in and purify me, and my false teeth ended up in the sea, beneath the platform.
The next day they got us up at dawn and, after roll call, took us to work, which amounted to building houses for Soviet advisers. We worked from dawn until eight or nine at night. I was put to work as assistant to a mason named Rodolfo; he was a man of about forty who had helped the rebels fighting against Castro at the beginning of the Revolution, and had been sentenced to death; later his sentence had been commuted to thirty years.
Many of the men in that prison had been sentenced to thirty years and had already served almost fifteen; the forced labor had aged them. Their whole lives had been destroyed by the system; they had gone to jail when they were eighteen and many were now almost forty and had served only half of their sentences.
Sunday afternoon was the only free time, and visitors were allowed every other week. On one of those visiting days, Juan Abreu came to see me; he could not hold back his tears when he saw me in prison uniform and with my head shaved. I tried to comfort him, and asked him to bring me a copy of the Iliad on his next visit so that I could continue my reading. When Abreu was leaving, Norberto Fuentes arrived. Full of optimism, he told me that I looked good and would probably be out of there in a few months. Naturally, I again made myself sound optimistic for his benefit, and promised that once out I would write nothing but praise for Fidel Castro’s Revolution.
Juan Abreu brought the Iliad on his next visit. As soon as he left, I started reading the last song, which I had not been able to finish after being captured in Lenin Park. After I finished it, I cried as I had not done since my imprisonment. Rodolfo, whose bunk was next to mine, could not understand why I would cry just because I had finished a book, and tried to comfort me. He told me not to worry, my mother would probably come on the next visiting day, and not to cry, because I would soon be released.
Every day at shower time I searched for my teeth in the water beneath the platform, but it was hopeless.
One afternoon one of the prisoners who served as liaison between us and the prison officials called me. He told me there was someone important waiting for me at the prison office. I came in and met Víctor, who stood up and greeted me with enthusiasm. He congratulated me and said that he was aware of my good behavior in jail, and that it was a pity I had to push so many wheelbarrows full of dirt; therefore he was going to try to transfer me to a bureaucratic job in the same prison. Everything was going well and, no doubt, I would soon be released. He also asked me to write a letter to my publishers in France, stating that I was practically free already and was spending my weekends at home. I wrote the letter and Víctor left quite satisfied; he had gained another victory. What he did not know was that through Juan Abreu I had sent secret notes to my friends in France, apprising them of my real situation and begging them to do all they could to get me out of the country.
Víctor came frequently and asked who had visited me. I knew that I was being watched and told Juan on his next visit not to come anymore because it was too risky for him. This was the last time I saw Juan at that jail. Norberto, however, visited me frequently, but I had no need to protect his name from State Security.
It was possible for prisoners to lock themselves up in a room of the house they were building for the Russians and have erotic encounters. Generally, the chief mason would select someone as his assistant, and that person eventually became his lover; in that way encounters could take place with greater ease, since chief and assistant had to work together and it would not seem so odd for them to be in one of those buildings or to continue on voluntary overtime during the evening, which earned them merits.
When Rodolfo chose me as his assistant, he had his erotic expectations. Men with thirty-year sentences had very few opportunities to have sex with a woman. It is true that many of the Russian women, wives of Soviet advisers, would sit around crossing their legs, wearing no panties, in order to provoke us as we walked by. I learned later that some of the prisoners sneaked out during the night and had sex with those Russian women. This was punished harshly, not only because the escapade was against the rules but because it was political treason. Even so, the women enjoyed the visits, and whenever we went by, they managed to lift their legs so that the prisoners could admire them. They were taking advantage of our situation for their own fun, we used to say.
Rodolfo would tell me how the Russian women excited him, especially a blonde with huge thighs and enormous breasts; he said he could not stand it any longer, and from my bunk I would see him getting an erection while he was talking to me. I never ventured to reach over and touch that exciting bulge, never dared to play the part of the Russian woman.
I remember another young prisoner whom I knew from my time at El Morro, who propositioned me. He was an assistant as well, and while we were preparing the mix for our master masons he would say, “Look, if you are going to wait until you are released, your ass is going to rust.” I paid no attention to him, and we continued working as friends.
Our place of work was next to the yard of a woman who had been a famous Cuban performer and later lost political favor. Xiomara Fernández was the perfect example of the type of woman that drove Cuban men wild. Every day she would come out and cut some of the roses growing in her yard, and she would intentionally bend over in such a way as to expose her bottom to the prisoners. Every day at ten in the morning, the rose ceremony would take place. The prisoners who were ready for the moment masturbated; it was a beautiful way of paying homage to her, which she accepted with great pleasure.
My best friend during that time was again the cook. He was called Sancocho [Slop Stew] because according to the inmates, the food that he prepared was mush fit for pigs. He weighed about three hundred pounds, he was a sort of human balloon; his greatest concern in life was the preparation of that food, which he concocted with such passion that he became the soul of the mess hall. His real obsession was not gluttony but the very act of preparing the food.
From the time I arrived he took a liking to me and always managed to bring me some of the leftover food. He had been sentenced to fifteen years, also for political reasons, and he knew the story of almost every inmate. He warned me about people I had to watch out for, and people I should not speak to at all. He was definitely gay but never said a word about it. Our friendship was platonic, a tacit brotherhood. While all the other prisoners called him Sancocho in a derogatory way, I always called him Gustavo, his real name. He was perhaps the kindest person I came to know in that prison. He had the peculiar intelligence that makes some people able to survive under any circumstances, and the special wisdom prisoners develop that enables them to forget the world outside, beyond the prison walls, that allows them to survive, hanging on to their small daily obligations and the ever-present petty quarrels and inconsequential gossip. With help from Sancocho, who provided me with a skimmer, I was able at last to fish my false teeth out of the water below the showers.
At noon Sancocho and the other cooks would take our lunch to wherever we were working; he distributed the food evenly; if he gave me a little more it was because there was some left over. One day, a big trailer truck pulled in to unload its cargo of reinforcing bars next to the building where we were working. Sancocho was standing by, watching, when the driver backed up suddenly and one of the steel bars pierced Sancocho’s huge body, killing him instantly. I do not know whether this was a simple accident; perhaps the driver did not bear him any ill will personally but just wanted to have some fun. Many prisoners laughed and thought it was funny to see how the steel rod had ripped through that huge body. No one ever mentioned Sancocho again.
Luckily for me, there was a general mobilization at the time and all of us were transferred to the countryside to build a school, one of the many basic secondary schools being built in Cuba with slave labor—that is, by prison inmates.
We arrived at a huge banana plantation where in two weeks we had to build a school. The students would come and keep the plantation clean, working for free for the government. The change of location was almost pleasant; I was in the country and I enjoyed the smell of fresh vegetation. There was a brook where we could swim during our few free moments. We worked day and night; many of those schools were built so quickly and with such meager building materials that they collapsed a month or two later. But by then it would be somebody else’s problem; ours was to finish the school as soon as possible.
In spite of working constantly, we prisoners were happier there; we could have our meals outdoors, and in the evening some men would make music, using a stool for a drum, and dance to it. It was not difficult to catch glimpses of bodies disappearing among the banana plants in search of erotic adventures.
One night someone sat down on my bunk; I thought he had made a mistake. In the darkness I felt hands on my chest as a voice said, “It’s me, Rodolfo.” He then lay down on my bunk, scarcely big enough for one person, and, trying to make as little noise as possible, pulled down his pants. Right there in the barracks, surrounded by more than five hundred prisoners, I masturbated Rodolfo who, at the end, could not help but groan with pleasure.
The next day we continued working without a word about what had happened, and we never did it again. He kept on talking to me about his hypothetical girlfriend and the fun he would have with her once he got his leave pass.
I had one major worry; I did not know whether I still had syphilis. The first thing I had told the doctor at El Morro after I recovered consciousness was that I had had syphilis around 1973. To get rid of it had been a major ordeal because the government controlled everything and the required medications were in the hands of the State. Another fear came from a doctor who had told me that syphilis could induce a flare-up of the meningitis I had had in my childhood.
Through my foreign friends I had been able to get penicillin, and checkups had shown that the syphilis was practically gone. Anyway, after I was released from State Security the doctor gave me another clandestine penicillin treatment, although he said I was cured.
Upon our return to Flores, while I was taking a shower, an imposing mulatto came in. As soon as he got in the shower he had an impressive erection; I have always been sensitive to that type of man. He approached me with his erect penis, and with my soapy hand I was fortunately able to rub him a few times until he ejaculated. I never saw anyone so happy after an ejaculation; he jumped up and down on the platform and said he was very glad to have met me. He told me we had to get together after twelve the next day, and I assented although I had no intention of meeting him. In any case, the next day the mulatto was mysteriously transferred. In my paranoia I thought he had been sent to me to determine if I was persisting in my sexual behavior, since in my recantation I had promised not to have further homosexual contacts.
Some Sundays we managed to swim in the ocean; it was a great joy to be able to jump into the sea and swim at least fifteen or twenty feet away from shore. This, of course, we did without the guards’ permission, and one of us had to stand watch in case a guard came. Naturally, when an inmate is transferred to an open jail, he does not try to escape because he knows that he will then be sent back to a maximum-security prison, and because he is convinced that no escape is possible. It was a privilege to be in a place like ours; some prisoners were even permitted to visit their families at times. I was eligible for a pass but did not take it because I had no place to go. Norberto Fuentes told me I could stay with him, but I preferred to remain in the prison until I was released.
Theoretically, no homosexuals were allowed where I was; they had to stay at El Morro or were sent to special concentration camps. But some homosexuals always managed to slip through into those jails for men. Besides myself, there was a very obvious fairy who was called La Condesa; his real name was Héctor, and he received “visitors” every night in the prison yard. I do not know how he managed, but he made tea and talked about ballet, poetry, and other topics of an artistic nature. We could read books there and always had something to talk about. Héctor’s predicament was that he was notoriously gay. One day the men told him he could no longer stay there because he was a faggot, which meant he would have to return to El Morro. He asked me for advice and I told him to make a list of all the men he had had relations with in that prison, and to threaten to inform on them. His list was endless. When the men found out, they had second thoughts on the matter of expulsion: “Hey, guys, drop it; there are married men here and you are going to get us in trouble,” they were saying. In short, the threat of exposing the prison as nothing but a queers’ den prevented Héctor from being expelled by the very men who had fucked him. He was able to complete his reeducation there, and at the same time, he was reeducating men in the bathrooms on his own while the rest were asleep.
Toward the end of 1975 there were already rumors among political prisoners about talks between Fidel Castro’s officials and those of the United States concerning amnesty for political prisoners and the possibility of their being able to leave for the United States. Naturally, that presented a huge dilemma. A few U.S. senators came to Cuba, and State Security handpicked the prisoners who would talk with them; in this way Cuban prisons did not make too bad an impression on these gentlemen.
Víctor came to see me one day and said that I was almost at the point of being released, and that they could perhaps find a job for me. I had no idea what to do with my freedom, or where I would live. My real friends were few in number; there are never many when one is out of favor with the system. The others, the police agents, were not to be trusted.