THE MONSERRATE HOTEL
My aunt, at last, scraped together the thousand pesos and I was able to move to Rubén’s room. We entered into a sort of illegal contract, with my aunt and her two delinquent sons as witnesses, stating that he, Rubén, was giving up forever any rights over the room he was selling to me for the sum of one thousand pesos. That document, however, could not be shown to the Cuban authorities except in a desperate situation because the sale of real estate is prohibited by law. But it was a way to tie Rubén down; if he tried to eject me from the room, I could produce the document, even if both of us landed in jail.
Though by now it was nothing but a fifth-rate building, the Monserrate Hotel had once been a pretty good place, inhabited exclusively by prostitutes. Prostitutes had been using the hotel for their business, and with Castro’s Revolution, they became owners of the rooms in which they lived, I imagine through their contacts with the new officers of the Rebel Army. This, of course, occurred at the beginning of the Revolution. When I moved in, only a few of those women, retired or semiretired, remained; old age had rehabilitated some of the others, who now lived in the rooms with two or three of their children.
It was a real jungle on the far side of the law. If the cops came, they would just have to put bars on the entrance to the building, the only way in or out, to turn the whole place into a jail.
Bebita and her friend lived on the first floor; these two women played drums and beat each other up every day because of jealousies. While her friend slept, Bebita would take other girlfriends to her room, and when her friend woke up, the ensuing ruckus would shake the entire building; cups and dishes would fly during the commotion.
“Snow White and the seven dwarfs” lived next to Bebita; it was a family of siblings, a woman and seven dwarfs who lived off the black market and the numbers game.
Across from Snow White and the seven dwarfs lived Muhammad, a fairy about sixty years old and weighing three hundred pounds. He had decorated his room with waxed-paper flowers and covered his walls with shiny paper and foreign magazine covers. His room was a strange combination of simulated and secret doors hidden behind the paper covering the walls; there he kept his money and his liquor. Muhammed spent his time making huge bouquets of awfully tacky flowers, which he sold in the building and all over Havana. He made some money selling those horrible flowers which had, however, a certain Versaillesque flair. The huge flower bouquets had a brilliance and outrageous splendor impossible then in Cuba, where even the most basic materials to make artificial flowers were unavailable. That man always had his room full of tough queers who ended up beating him and stealing his money, and then escaped through the balcony while Muhammad yelled at them. He lived with his mother, an old lady of about ninety, who would unburden her troubles to me or to Bebita and her friend, telling us that none of the men her son brought home was any good, they were not trustworthy people.
One day, one of those men, who was Muhammad’s lover but lived with wife and son in our building, burst into the fairy’s room and started beating him on the head with a stick; the room was splattered with blood and everyone rushed in to try to rescue him. The man fled, and it took Muhammad a week in the hospital to recover. His mother, who had received a blow in the scuffle, died a few weeks later.
There were also constant battles on the second floor, where I lived, and where Teresa lived. She apparently shared her husband with her sister, and the two sisters beat each other all over the building in the most outlandish manner.
Water for the building was collected in some old tanks that I had cleaned. One had to be on the lookout in order to fill them because water would come every other day. Rubén was literally starving to death, but he had no energy to work nor did he want to. He was bisexual, and when I moved in, it took some effort to keep him away; once in a while he would slip into my bed. I finally had to block off the door between our rooms with bricks. The work was done by a mason named Ludgardo, who had the most unusual imagination: In Guanabacoa, where he lived, he had constructed aerial channels made of zinc over the roofs of several houses, which allowed him to collect as much rainwater as possible in his own tanks and never be short of water. With tin drums punched with holes, he had also built a Ferris wheel, airplanes, and other equipment—a complete amusement park for his children. And when there were no shoes, he could make a pair of Swedish clogs out of any piece of wood; his whole family clattered around in those enormous artifacts.
Rubén was a lost cause; his life’s dream was to buy himself a pair of jeans, and now that he had the thousand pesos that I paid him, he was shown a brand-new pair. He was told that for two hundred pesos he could have a pair just like it. Naturally, he took the money, paid the agreed amount, and was given his package. When he came to my room and opened it, he found nothing but old newspapers: he had been swindled. I tried to prevent him from spending that money, which he owed the other crook, but he paid no attention to me; he was very generous with his friends and was always inviting them to dinner. He even invited me once to the Moscow Restaurant, one of Havana’s most exclusive places in those days.
Víctor, needless to say, quickly found out where I lived and came to visit; he asked me about my new friends and again promised me a job. To spare my real friends any complications, I hung a sign on my door reading VISITORS ARE APPRECIATED BUT NOT RECEIVED. I also painted the word NO in red ink on the wall. That NO sign was my way of protesting against any cops who, disguised as friends, might try to visit me.
Sometimes, at three in the morning Rubén would write a poem and knock on my door to read it to me; I had no choice but to listen.
Pepe Malas lived on the third floor of the building. The owner of the room was a French prostitute, and there was a big fuss when the men she brought in did not want to pay her or when she tried to steal their wallets. One day the woman decided to return to France, fed up with all the misery, and Pepe held on to the room.
Pepe and I kept tabs on each other, though we were not on speaking terms and in general tried to make each other’s lives even more impossible.
One late evening Pepe and a group of his friends, among whom was Hiram Prado, pooled some money to pay a young man who charged twenty pesos to fuck them. When he entered the building, I happened to be in the elevator. All the fairies had gathered on Pepe Malas’s balcony waiting for him. Since he did not know how to operate the elevator, I showed him, going up and down several times between the first and fifth floors. Pepe Malas and his coterie saw the elevator go up and down—it was a sort of hanging cage—without stopping on the floor where they, all excited, were waiting for him. We finally stopped at my floor. The youth had brought a pineapple, and I suggested that we eat it in my room. We ate the pineapple and then made love.
Pepe, enraged, went from floor to floor calling out for him, while we lay naked in my room, bursting with laughter. Pepe never forgave me for this. From then on, all kinds of things commonly used in witchcraft began to appear outside my door: chicken feet, pigeon heads, and the like.
In the meantime, I had again finished Farewell to the Sea and had stored it in a drawer in Elia’s home, a very dangerous proposition because of her strong Revolutionary convictions. But it would have been even more dangerous to keep the manuscript in my room since I could be searched at any minute; Pepe could inform on me, or else any of the former prostitutes who were now Communist Party militants.
There was a “loft craze” in those days; that is, in any room where it was possible, people would build platforms that could be reached by small attached ladders. This was done to gain a little more living space. Many times the lofts were so close to the ceiling that you had to crawl, not walk, on them. The government prohibited the construction of lofts and so they had to be built in secret. Even Snow White and the seven dwarfs had one.
Not to be outdone, I managed to get some wood on the black market to build my own. One day, as I was carrying a large board, I came upon Alejo Carpentier, who was giving a lecture from a stand set up in the street. I interrupted his lecture by crossing between the writer and his audience, with the huge board on my shoulder. I stopped to comment to someone in the audience that the man could not even speak Spanish anymore, that all he could do was produce a guttural sound with such a heavy French accent that he sounded like a frog. This person burst out laughing and so did I, and the end of my board struck Alejo’s makeshift lectern.
During my stay in Oriente to visit my mother I had met a beautiful recruit from Palma Soriano with whom I had a sort of flirtation. Since I did not have any address in Oriente to give him, we agreed to meet in three months at the Havana bus terminal. On the appointed day, I went to the terminal without the slightest hope that the recruit would be there; however, there he was. His name was Antonio Téllez, but he preferred to be called Tony. We went to my room, and strangely enough, the boy had never had any homosexual experience. When I began touching him, he laughed; it was evident that he was a novice; he was nervous and had trouble getting excited. We finally ended up being good friends.
Tony and Ludgardo were the ones who built my loft; it was not easy. Huge holes had to be opened in the walls with sledgehammers and chunks of iron, and we had to work without making noise so that the president of my CDR would not notice anything unusual. We had to wrap the hammers in rags to muffle the blows. It was a real ordeal to find boards and then to sneak them, late at night, into the building. Bebita, her friend, Muhammad, and I kept scavenging through garbage cans in Old Havana for pieces of wood and old boards.
Later Nicolás Abreu brought a huge quantity of small boards that he had found in garbage piles around his neighborhood in Arroyo Apolo; with these we paneled the loft. In the spaces between beams and flooring I was able to hide the manuscript of Farewell to the Sea, together with the document signed by Rubén Díaz stating he had sold me the room for one thousand pesos.
There was a bus stop near my building jokingly called the Stop for Success or the Last Hope. Facing the Manzana de Gómez, a landmark block, it was the preferred pickup place for gays. The area was so congested that it was difficult not to make a contact. Once more I came across Hiram Prado, who at that time was Pepe Malas’s archenemy. We greeted each other and he asked me where I lived; I told him I lived with Pepe Malas. He was flabbergasted because he knew that Pepe was a cop, and that I had gone to jail thanks to him; he could not believe that we were living together. Hiram then started to spread the rumor all over Havana that I was living with Pepe Malas, and one night he came with a number of his hoodlum friends to Pepe’s room, banging on the door and yelling vile insults directed at me. Pepe came out and tried to hit Hiram with a broomstick, but the thugs Hiram had brought along gave Pepe a monumental beating.
For months Pepe lived in a state of permanent rage because my mail would come to him and many visitors who wanted to see me would knock on his door.
On the same floor as Pepe, Marta Carriles lived with her family, as well as a “slave” they called La Gallega. I met La Gallega when she tried to flee with one of her lovers; through my window I saw an enormous suitcase being lowered on a rope. Later I heard loud noises on the third floor; Marta was chasing La Gallega to prevent her from escaping.
Marta Carriles’s husband was a truck driver who brought home tubers and vegetables that Marta later sold in the neighborhood. Marta also practiced santería and many people came to her home for consultations. She had two beautiful sons, one of whom had had sexual relations with Rubén; he was an adolescent about fifteen years old. I frequently saw the other one, who was also very handsome, in the elevator with a woman. As far as I was concerned, I had no illusions without my front teeth. Besides, getting my teeth fixed was practically impossible because I needed a doctor’s certificate, a worker’s ID, a clinic’s recommendation; I had none of those and perhaps never would.
I did, nevertheless, recover my smile thanks to Alderete, a man of about sixty who worked as a transvestite, sometimes at Tropicana or at other lesser cabarets. He had been very famous in the forties and owned a large collection of wigs in all shades; he impersonated most of the well-known Cuban performers and his best act was an impression of Rosita Fornés, displaying a more powerful voice than the artist herself. The tale was told that on one occasion he had taken home a juvenile delinquent who tried to rob him at knifepoint. Alderete asked him to wait a moment so he could get the money, and went into the closet. Soon he reappeared disguised as a beautiful woman, and the hoodlum was fascinated by that woman who sucked his prick and who, unnoticed, took his wallet. The youth did not realize that the beautiful woman was the same old queer he had tried to mug. Later, that hoodlum fell in love with Alderete’s impersonation and Alderete used to wear his best attire when the youth came to visit.
Eventually the ruffian realized that behind all those clothes and all that makeup there was nothing but an old fairy; perhaps he had suspected it before, but the fact is that one day he got mad and took revenge by stealing everything Alderete owned, including his huge wig collection.
I met him while he was in the depths of a depressive crisis caused by “the great theft,” as he referred to it. Totally bald and wrapped in a blanket, he actually looked as ghastly as Pepe Malas himself. But shortly afterward he recovered all his clothes and wigs, and was again impersonating Rosita Fornés.
It was through him that I was able to have my teeth fixed. Alderete knew a dentist who was an admirer of his, and who did not charge me a penny for cementing the two teeth I so badly needed back into the bridge. Now, whenever I opened my mouth, my teeth would no longer keep falling out.
Being able to smile again probably encouraged me to exercise, and I started to jump up and down on my loft, which, not being very secure, came down and I with it. I spent a week pulling nails with a hammer to take the loft apart so that I could rebuild it on new beams. I was working at this when two French citizens knocked on my door: a young man and a girl who had been sent by Jorge and Margarita Camacho. They were staying in Jibacoa Beach as tourists and had come to Havana for a week. With them, of course, my third version of Farewell to the Sea left the country.
That French couple were much surprised at my state when they met me; I was wearing shorts made from old pants cut off with a knife, no shirt, and was pulling nails from boards strewn all about the room. They could not conceive of a writer living under such conditions, much less after they had read my books in France. They invited me to have dinner at a restaurant and go with them to Jibacoa, but the authorities would not allow me to enter the beach town.
The French tourists left and I was terrified for a week, awaiting a visit from State Security. I did not know whether they had been able to get the manuscript out or if it had landed in Víctor’s hands. Fortunately, they got it out.
I was still surrounded by boards and other junk when I heard Hiram Prado in the hallway; by then he had found out that I was not living with Pepe Malas. I stuck my head out the door and asked him to wait outside. Quickly I wrote another mock notice or bureaucratic document, like a pardon, stating that the penalty of two years’ withdrawal of friendship had been reduced to six months and he should come and see me after that period had elapsed. Then I would give him the conditions on which our future friendship would be based. I handed him the document and he left.
Rubén decided to impose on me a fifty-cent charge every time I had to share his bathroom; it was blackmail, but it was his bathroom. My situation was getting worse all the time, and I was at my wits’ end when one day a beautiful young man showed up at my door, barefoot, with no shirt, and asked me for a cigarette. I didn’t have any, but I asked him in and closed the door. He told me he knew I was a writer, but I was not in the least interested in discussing literature; I wanted him. I learned that he was the older son of Marta Carriles and that his name was Lázaro. Muhammad told me he was a great young man, but the elevator operator said that he was insane, and a delinquent.
His mother, Marta, was a witch who quarreled with her female neighbors and even had fistfights with them, as well as with her children. Lázaro himself told me how horrible things really were at his home and I soon found out that he was different from the rest of his family; he obviously had some psychological problems but he was not vulgar and sleazy like them. Lázaro longed for peace and wanted to be able to read good literature.
We made several trips outside the city; we went to Guanabo, swam out from the Malecón although it was illegal, and also swam near La Concha Beach. One day I noticed that there was a dangerous violent streak in him. We were horsing around and he hit me so hard in the face that I was afraid he had broken my teeth. Enraged, I ran after him with a stick. I think that after that emotional incident our friendship became deeper; he realized that he had to be a little more careful with me, and I learned that he had been committed to the Mazorra Psychiatric Hospital; this caused my affection for him to grow.
I found out that in order to have one mouth less to feed, his family had taken him to that insane asylum, the worst in Havana. At the hospital he had been given a number of electroshock treatments. He told me that on one occasion, when he returned home at night, his parents would not let him in; a farmer had given his mother a piece of pork and his parents had locked themselves in to eat it so they would not have to share it with him, their own son. He had to sleep outside the door that night. After hearing his story, I told him that he could sleep in my room anytime, and gave him a key. Our greatest pleasure was to walk all over the city; sometimes we would jump over fences and swim at the off-limits beaches.
Through Rubén we met another fascinating person who was always inventing the most unusual ways to escape from the Island. He believed we could leave on a plastic raft, provided we first caught some large fishes—sharks even—tied them to the raft, and pointed them north; he said that in this way we could arrive in Miami in about three days. He claimed his name was Raúl, but one never knew which were the real names of Rubén’s friends.
At the Payret Theater there were always long lines because they showed French and U.S. films. Raúl figured out that the daily box office receipts would amount to some ten thousand pesos, and he thought of a weird plan to steal the money. He would approach the box office attendant with a huge balloon of compressed gas, open it, and, under cover of the gas cloud, steal the money and disappear in the crowd. Or he might approach the attendant with a bottle of chloroform, which she would smell and then faint, while we took the money.
Rubén and his cronies did manage to invent a machine to make counterfeit money, and one night they were all arrested. The printing press was in Julio Gómez’s home, and he and Pepe Malas were close friends. The strange thing about this was that, while Raúl disappeared for good, Julio and Rubén remained free. One day I discovered the reason: I saw Lieutenant Víctor leave Rubén’s apartment.
One of Rubén’s visitors was a painter by the name of Blanca Romero, who apparently had fallen out of favor with the system. Her husband had been Sigmundo Bonheur, once in charge of some diplomatic service in Africa but later sent by Castro to a concentration camp in Camagüey. One day Rubén came into my room complaining that while he was in the bathroom Blanca had put on all his clothes and walked away with them. Rubén, Lázaro, and I went to Blanca’s; it was sort of a hovel in a tenement on Monserrate Street, a cave with no windows, only a small door. Blanca had many children of many fathers: black, Arabian, and Chinese. She practiced a certain sexual internationalism. After her husband was jailed, she became a prostitute and that was how she made a living, because nobody wanted to buy the pictures she painted, even though they were extraordinary.
In those days she and her current husband, Theodosio Tapiez, would visit well-known painters such as Raúl Martínez, Carmelo González, and others, and while her husband praised the paintings, Blanca would steal some brushes and oils she needed to be able to paint. Under the counter, she would buy flour bags from grocers and pick up pieces of cloth from garbage cans. Thus she would paint the huge canvases that covered entire walls in her apartment.
When we arrived, Blanca proudly showed us one of her masterpieces, and we forgot to ask for the clothes. From then on I visited Blanca regularly; she always managed to have tea and a hard-boiled egg. This was the usual fare for most of us; eggs were not rationed and Russian tea could be purchased at the market, although with some difficulty.
One day Blanca summoned all her friends and children to her little room, where we almost suffocated. She said: “I have called you because I have terrible news for you: my tits have collapsed,” and lowering her blouse, she showed us two small black breasts hanging over her stomach. This was a tragedy because she could no longer work as a prostitute, which was how she supported her children, her mother, and Theodosio, who was studying at the university and could not work. I remember her children surrounding her, crying because of the tragedy. We all tried to comfort her, including her mother, who said: “Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to help you. But now go and wash your feet, they are filthy.” Blanca’s feet were so dirty that her mother took a knife and started to scrape them.
The heat was oppressive and Blanca complained that her room did not even have a window. We immediately started to open a hole in the wall to make a window with what had once been a machete. The wall was over three feet thick, and when we got to the other side we realized that it did not lead to the street but to a huge convent, the Convent of Santa Clara, which had been abandoned by the nuns after Castro came to power. Practically intact, the convent was full of furniture, trunks, stained-glass windows, and all sorts of objects.
With a discipline worthy of ants we started to dismantle the convent and sell everything we found inside. Suddenly, out of Blanca’s little room, with scarcely enough space for a few chairs, twenty or thirty rocking chairs would emerge, or four or five chests, which we would immediately sell all over Havana; on one occasion we filled a whole truck.
One day the president of the CDR in her block knocked on Blanca’s door and said she could not understand how Blanca could have so many things in her small room; the opening to the convent was covered with one of Blanca’s paintings. There was only one thing to do, to bribe the president of the CDR; she was told to take whatever she pleased. The woman took all she could, and did not inform on us.
I built a cedar loft in my room, installed a toilet and a marble kitchen, and completed my small living room with eighteenth-century furniture.
Next, Lázaro and I removed all the fine woodwork from the ceiling of the convent; in my loft I had a collection of samples of the wood for sale. Blanca, of course, collected a percentage of everything we made. Slabs of red marble were especially successful; even Elia and Pepe bought some.
One night, while we were hauling a great number of crucifixes, silver chalices, and other valuable objects, a cop stopped us and asked us what that “shit” was all about. We told him we had found everything in a demolished building in Old Havana and wanted to use the objects to decorate our homes. He thought that none of the stuff had any value and allowed us to continue with our load.
Ludgardo set up a Swedish clog factory, thanks to Blanca’s hole. For us that hole constituted a true treasure trove; we even sold the floor tiles all over Havana.
Finally Bebita had the idea of building balconies and more lofts in our building, and this we did with the wood and the tiles from Blanca’s hole. My room was suddenly an apartment complete with balcony with medieval iron railings. Even the very president of the CDR in our building had her loft.
When Rubén realized what my room had become, he told me that since I did not own it, he would reclaim possession any day now. I looked at him calmly and told him that I, indeed, had ownership of that place. He said I could not prove it and I went to my small kitchen, fetched a huge knife I had taken from the convent, and, showing it to him, said: “Here is my ownership of the room.” After that, he never mentioned the matter again.
Blanca decided to throw a party in the hole after almost everything had been sold. We bought candles on the black market and decorated the whole convent with them. The party started at midnight. All we had was hard-boiled eggs and tea, but Blanca had invited all her old friends—that is, retired prostitutes, elegant pimps, queens who only ventured out at night. Hiram Prado was also there. That night Blanca and I drew up a document stating that, in view of the diabolic nature of Hiram Prado, we could only meet in places like that hole, on treetops, or at the bottom of the sea, but that we had definitely pardoned him. Hiram was writing his autobiography and that night he read some passages to us. He had included Blanca as one of the most cultured women and one of the greatest painters of this century, and he said that I was the José Martí of my generation. Later I learned that Hiram changed the text of his autobiography depending on where he was going to read it. In other versions I was a hoodlum, and Blanca a cheap hooker.
Another guest in that hole was Bruno García Leiva, an odd character who was always impersonating someone else, perhaps because he himself did not exist. That night he was disguised as a priest with a scapular and a black robe; he really looked like a monk, and many of the retired prostitutes asked him to hear their confessions, which he did with great solemnity.
Sometimes he disguised himself as a doctor and we would go to the Calixto García Hospital. While I wailed pitifully, Bruno would take me to one of the emergency wards of the hospital and pilfer medical certificates, rubber stamps, and prescription pads; these were real treasures. Bruno sold the certificates at the price of gold to people who did not want to work on the farms. Alcoholics bought the prescriptions so they could purchase alcohol at the pharmacy. Hiram Prado, a chronic alcoholic, would give anything for one of those prescriptions.
Also at the party in the hole that night were Amando García, Ludgardo, and Sekuntala. Ludgardo was a tall and strong mulatto whose penis and balls were clearly outlined under his pants. I remember that everyone at the party had to perform a skit, and Amando threw himself on the floor, covered himself with one of Blanca’s canvases, and, voicing an increasingly passionate yearning, began to sing a song in praise of Ludgardo with lyrics—a silly tongue twister really—which ran more or less like this: “Oh, Ludgardo, calm my ardor; don’t be laggard, don’t be tardy, or I’ll bite hard. Give me your dart, give me your dart, oh, my Ludgard.” Ludgardo was not even gay, but he had a lot of fun.
I also recited some of my own doggerel, such as: “I feel as happy as Minerva, who did voluntary work all day, and received as her heavenly pay, from the Party an ice-cold Materva.”
Alderete had brought his wig collection, and the voice of Rosita Fornés rang out among the candles. Finally Ludgardo declared that there should be some buried treasure in the convent and we had to find it. Blanca then made us sign a document stating that if treasure was found she would be entitled to fifty percent. So our party became a sort of treasure hunt. We started digging and did not find any gold, but we did discover a cistern of water, which in Old Havana was almost a treasure. It was fully operational.
From then on we sold up to two hundred cans of water daily; long lines formed in front of Blanca’s hole.
Blanca and Amando García decided to hold Hiram Prado prisoner in the hole. When I inquired as to their reasons, they said they had found out what Hiram had indeed written about Blanca in his autobiography. Blanca had then taken possession of the autobiography, in which she was actually described as a seventy-year-old witch who had spread syphilis all over Havana and had been fucked by all the Greek sailors; it also said that she was a lesbian who had sexual relations with her own daughters, and that she was an informer for State Security. Blanca decided that Hiram would remain tied up in that hole until he had written a new autobiography and that, needless to say, she would never return the original. Three days later, Lázaro and I untied him.
By then there was nothing left in the convent to be sold but the walls, and that is precisely what Lázaro and I set out to do: tear down the inner walls of the convent, then clean each brick and sell them all over the city, which was good business because nobody in Cuba could ever get hold of a brick.
Not surprisingly, we received an “anonymous” letter from Hiram saying that he would report all the orgies and crimes being committed in Blanca Romero’s hole to the higher authorities.
One day the president of the CDR summoned Blanca and told her that some cops had asked her whether it was true that Blanca was engaged in the illegal sale of wood and water. The woman suggested to Blanca that she stop all sales.
The only way to erase all our tracks was to tear down the convent, but before we did that, I wanted to strip the rest of the roof and sell the remaining boards. We enjoyed the wonderful view of Old Havana from up there.
While tearing down a wall, we suddenly discovered an enclosure hitherto unknown to us, with four safes, all of them locked. Apparently the nuns had built a false wall to hide the real treasure. Since we could not find the combinations to unlock the safes, we battered them with sledgehammers for a whole week until we managed to open them. They were empty. This was evidently the reason the convent had been boarded up: Castro’s officials had been there, emptied out the safes, and tried to cover up the theft. If we were accused of that theft, we could get thirty years for misappropriation. We quickly destroyed the wall that supported what little remained of the inner structure of the convent; then, when it was near the point of collapsing, Ludgardo tied a rope to it and we pulled hard from Blanca’s room until, in the midst of a deafening rumble, everything came down.
A few days later a serious typhus epidemic swept over Old Havana. Fidel Castro walked through the neighborhood and said the disease was caused by the huge amount of garbage in the city. In fact, garbage had not been collected for over three years in that section of the city; buildings were caving in and it was a veritable paradise for rats and all kinds of vermin and disease-bearing animals.
Caravans of military trucks converged on the city in a “cleaning offensive,” and in twenty-four hours everything that had remained of the Santa Clara Convent had disappeared.
A few weeks later Lázaro again had a nervous breakdown, which happened to him frequently. He would sit on the stairway, talk to himself, swear at the ceiling, and speak incoherently. In that state he knew no one, not even me.
He wanted to write but could not do so; after two or three lines, he would let go of the paper and cry in impotent rage. I told him he was a writer even if he never wrote a single page, and that gave him some comfort. He wanted me to teach him to write, but writing is not a profession, it is a curse; his terrible fate was to be touched by the curse while his mental condition actually prevented him from writing. I never loved him as much as on the day I saw him facing that piece of white paper, and crying because he could not write.
I lent him books that I thought would help him in his literary development; it was amazing how those books awakened his sensibilities to an even greater extent and enabled him to discover what many critics in many instances had not noticed. Sometimes he would call me from his bathroom window and read paragraphs of Don Quixote to me; occasionally those readings ended when our neighbors began throwing stones at us because we were not letting them sleep.
In our get-togethers we were joined by a wacky character named Turcio, a former boat skipper and a lover of literature who had been driven mad by his wife. Turcio talked nonstop and if, for example, he heard two women arguing, he would repeat incessantly during the whole day whatever those two women had said to each other. So when Lázaro and I had our literary meetings, Turcio would spend the day repeating over and over the passages he had heard, a sort of relay public-address system. Other times he would go into the hallway and yell out all the local news he heard: “This year there will be no meat”; “Chickens were received, but only for children under six”; “The thirty-two bus will no longer come this way”; and things like that. He would repeat everything his crazed ear took in.
One day the recruit from Palma Soriano, who was still my friend, came to visit with one of his cousins, a cop in full uniform, gun and all. The recruit said to me, “Don’t worry, I brought him with me because I know that in this way you will gain prestige in the building, and nobody will bother you.” The cop was a queer of Asian descent who, five minutes after arrival, had removed his gun and cartridge belt, and while I showed him my loft, he unzipped his pants and took out his beautiful Oriental penis. The recruit stayed below, smoldering. After an hour, though, we parted company on friendly terms. All this time Turcio had been yelling that the police were in my home; what none of the neighbors could imagine was the formidable weapon the cop was aiming at me.
Sometimes when the recruits or the cop came, Lázaro would have attacks of jealousy. I always told him the truth; he was the person I really loved, and the others were just pastimes. I have always thought that love is one thing and sexual relations are another; real love involves a deep understanding and intimacy that are absent in mere sexual intercourse.
Lázaro had sexual relationships with women, and I never demanded that he break them off; on the contrary, I encouraged him to continue; I thought this would lead us to a better understanding. I preferred to have relations with a man who had sex with women; I wanted to be his friend but not the woman who cooked for him and took care of his daily needs. Thus, when he made love to me, he would do it for the love of a friend and not because of any obligation.
So I was happy at the news that Lázaro wanted to marry Mayra, a very nice young woman who had been his fiancée for several years. They thought that by getting married they could be assigned a house, since her stepfather had pretty good government connections. The wedding took place at the official Wedding Palace and I was best man.
For their honeymoon they went to Santa María del Mar Beach, and Lázaro insisted that I go with them. One night Mayra knocked on my door and told me Lázaro was ill; it was his nerves again, and he wanted me in his room. He was having one of his breakdowns. I have never understood madness too well but feel that in a way insane people are angels who, unable to bear the realities around them, must somehow take refuge in another world. When I went up to him he asked me to stay, and laid his head on my hands; Mayra was intelligent and understanding. The next day he was feeling much better and the three of us went down to the beach.
Mayra’s stepfather could not manage to get them an apartment and they had to move in with Marta Carriles. We built a loft over the kitchen; Marta already had one in the living room. Lázaro’s loft was so low that they could not stand up in it. One day their pressure cooker exploded, hitting the ceiling; it sounded like a bomb. All the neighbors in the building ran out, thinking it was a real explosion, while the two of them continued making love in their loft, laughing. Lázaro called me through their small window, and I leaned out over the improvised balcony to wave at him; I knew what was going on and it also gave me pleasure.
Lázaro and I went to Pinar del Río together, and we swam nude in the rivers, rode horseback, and enjoyed nature. At night the iron folding bed that we were given creaked furiously.
While we were in one of those country shacks I learned the story of La Gallega. She had had a boyfriend who took her away from home, got her pregnant, and a few months later abandoned her. She was then rejected by her family and Marta Carriles took her in, but on condition that she be her maid. Actually she was more like her slave and worked nonstop, like my mother. La Gallega had a daughter being raised by her in-laws in the country, and she was not allowed to go see her.
On my return to the old Monserrate Hotel, one of the most notorious scandals in its history took place between Hiram Prado and Pepe Malas.
Hiram Prado had a lover in Holguín called Nonito, whom he apparently cared for very much. Again on friendly terms with Pepe, Hiram told him about the physical endowments of this young man, and Pepe, without further ado, took a train to Holguín and brought Nonito to Havana, enticing him with promises of shirts and jeans. One fine day, when Hiram knocked on Pepe’s door, it was Nonito who opened it, and in the buff. Hiram went berserk; he came to my room asking for a sledgehammer and other construction tools, and armed with all those weapons he went back to Pepe’s room and smashed his glass door. (All the doors at the Monserrate had glass panels, although I had backed mine with a metal plate.) Pepe and Nonito came out with a broom, and the commotion was such that Hiram, besides breaking Pepe’s door, also smashed Marta Carriles’s as well as that of a large family who were all Jehovah’s Witnesses. When all those people went after Hiram, he took refuge in my room; I was afraid they would knock my door down and, at the top of my voice, called Bebita. She showed up with a knife, followed by her friend Victoria. “Civil war has broken out at the Monserrate Hotel!” proclaimed Turcio. In the midst of that madness everyone came out to settle old quarrels; Muhammad was attacked by Snow White and the seven dwarfs; Teresa and her sister again started pulling each other’s hair; Caridad González, the president of the CDR, got slapped by Marta Carriles; the elevator operator was kicked by one of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the meantime, hidden in my room, Hiram and I were listening to the din of battle, while Bebita and Victoria, with strong masculine voices, tried to restore order.
So great was the scandal that the next day Hiram Prado and I left for Holguín; from there, after waiting in line for a long time, we took a bus to Gibara. Again I was face-to-face with the sea, the sea of my childhood, but by then the city was already a ghost town, and the port itself had been extensively reclaimed by the sand.
Back in Holguín we went to Hiram’s home and had dinner with his mother, a poor peasant woman, discreet but aware of almost all of Hiram’s erotic adventures. He seized this occasion to introduce me to a number of pretty well known, notorious characters in town, among them Gioconda Carrelero, whose husband was extremely gay. She loved her man above everything else, but he went crazy over adolescents. While we were there one youth called the woman’s husband from the street, yelling: “Armando, you faggot, give me the pair of shoes you promised me! Do you think I stuck my cock in you for fun?” He was making such a racket that Gioconda came out of the house and gave him a pair of Armando’s shoes.
I also met Beby Urbino, who had always been a repressed gay. He lived in an enormous house which was being invaded by wild vegetation. His philosophy was that love and sex were nothing but a source of sorrow. I, for one, have never been able to live in abstinence, and so I told Urbino: “I’ll take my chances.”
Hiram and I cruised around Calixto García Park, and it was easy for us to connect with a group of teenagers we met. To bid farewell to the city of Holguín, we took them to Loma de la Cruz. There, near the cross on the hilltop, we were fucked by a dozen adolescents and then, triumphant and rejuvenated, we took the train back to Havana.
Lázaro now had a job as a lathe operator in a factory. He had to get up early and on weekends do “voluntary” guard duty; this had again affected his mental state. He often left Mayra in the loft and came to sleep in my room. Later, when the harvest started, Lázaro had to go to Camagüey to cut sugarcane. A few days after he left I received a letter from him wanting to know how I was doing and asking me to come see him.
His brother Pepe and I took one of those infernal trains, and a week later arrived at a place called Manga Larga; from there we went to the labor camp, where we found Lázaro, who had one of his breakdowns and had been unable to work in the cane fields. The next day we went to work with him; the moment we arrived at the cane field, I felt as if I were entering Hell. We stayed with him for a week, but when he realized that we were about to leave, he became desperate and started yelling.
When he returned a month later, he had lost over thirty pounds; he was ill, his nervous disorder had intensified, and his mother wanted to get hold of the little money he had earned in the sugarcane harvest. I remember that Lázaro once got up at midnight, climbed down from the loft, and picked up a machete he had brought with him. I saw him swinging it around close to his stomach. I leaped down, and when I attempted to grab the machete, he attacked me. I ran out naked to call Lázaro’s parents; they came at once and when we opened the door, he dropped to the floor, unconscious. He went through a terrible crisis for about a week.
His mother knocked on my door carrying a bucket with two turtles. She said Saint Lazarus had communicated with her and told her that these would bring me and her son good fortune, and we should keep them. I kept the turtles, although I was sorry to see them confined in that bucket and it was hard to get food for them because they ate only meat or fish.
Some time before, Hiram Prado had introduced me to a strange character who claimed he had been a political prisoner and was doing all he could to leave the country in a boat; his name was Samuel Toca, and he lived in a cell in the Episcopal cathedral in the Vedado. Samuel had actually already tried, together with some friends, to escape in a motorboat from the southern shore of the country, with the idea of making it to Grand Cayman Island. Samuel had a wild passion for England and thought that if he could reach Grand Cayman, he would be taken immediately to England to see Queen Elizabeth, for whom he felt a compulsive adoration. Way out at sea the boat’s motor broke down and there was no way of repairing it because they could not find the wrench needed to open it. Since under the circumstances the motor was a hindrance, they threw it overboard to continue their trip by rowing to Grand Cayman. Then they discovered that the wrench had been underneath the motor. They drifted some more until they saw land and started to hail the Queen. They were quickly arrested by Cuban militiamen and later sentenced to eight years in prison. Samuel was “rehabilitated” and had to serve only two and a half years. When I met him he had been released from jail, and was living in the Episcopal church, though his mother was still alive, ill with cancer, in her home in Trinidad [Cuba]. When he later invited me to visit him in Trinidad, I noticed a large photograph of Queen Elizabeth in the living room. Below the photograph there was a small table at which Samuel sat religiously every day at five, dressed completely in black, with top hat and black gloves, to have tea with some of his friends.
Samuel used to walk around Trinidad in that attire, top hat and all, even though the temperature might be over a hundred degrees. It was not only his strange way of dressing, but that he looked as bizarre as humanly possible: he was tall and ungainly, with his straight hair streaking over his forehead, bulging eyes, a protruding, curved nose, large mouth, huge teeth and pimply face, long and bony hands. He looked like one of the witches from Macbeth or from Disney’s animated films.
Although his love life was pretty open, he still had some of the customs of a seminarian; he had been studying for a religious career in Matanzas and was later transferred to the Episcopal church in Havana. Samuel’s cell was more a center for literary gathering than a place for religious meditations; every night more than fifteen people would meet there. One had to jump a high fence, walk through several hallways, and climb a long staircase before finally reaching Samuel’s room. Héctor Angulo, Roberto Valero, Amando García, I, and other friends would meet there daily.
When we were alone, Samuel and I talked about the possibilities for leaving the country in secret. He said he knew someone in Matanzas who for a large sum of money could get us out of Cuba.
Every night around midnight Samuel’s room was pelted with a shower of stones. He said the CDR people threw those stones to protest his religious activities. All the jalousies had to be closed. The attacks would last about half an hour, and then peace reigned again. At that time Samuel would ceremoniously serve tea, always in honor of Her Britannic Majesty, and he would read us some of his awful poems.
We finally went to Matanzas and actually saw a woman who told us she could get us out of the country. She asked for the names of those who would be in the boat; I did not want to give her my name or Lázaro’s. Samuel was very open and talked to her as if he had known her for a long time. We then stayed at Roberto Valero’s home and walked all over Matanzas with him. We went swimming in the bay and I’ll never forget the image of Samuel Toca in shorts: with such a bony body, he looked perfectly frightful; some kids bathing nearby even threw stones at him. It was awful to be near such a ghastly-looking individual. I jumped in and swam underwater; when I came up, horrors! I was next to a Russian ship which, however, steamed away quickly.
On my return to Havana Víctor visited me and said, “Well, what happened to your secret escape boat?” I didn’t know what to say; he already knew the full story. From then on I feared everyone, especially Samuel Toca. Víctor told me that I was a counterrevolutionary; I did not deserve the good treatment I had received from the Revolution, and anytime now I would land back in jail.
It was a time when what could be called the War of the Anonymous Letters started; everybody received insulting anonymous communications. Several of them were sent to me, or to others referring to me, in which I was described as a terrible person who had even murdered an adolescent. I am sure Pepe was responsible for that one. But I did not lag behind; in every rest room in Havana I left graffiti with lengthy slogans against Pepe Malas, stating that he was the most faggoty faggot of them all, and that he was an informer for State Security. Even Pepe was terrified, because whenever he went to a rest room in search of adventure, he would see those messages and run away.
The anonymous letter that really shook up Pepe was the one written about Samuel Toca.
Pepe Malas had told Samuel Toca that his poems were really dreadful, and thereafter Toca refused to talk to him. Hiram and I wrote a communiqué and sent it all over Havana; it was a moral and patriotic appeal to all decent and respectable people of the city to condemn the orgies taking place at the Episcopal church. The communiqué was really not too far from the truth because Samuel would bring anyone he met into the church, including a cop who happened to be a closet queen.
I had met that cop before Samuel did. I remember his telling me that when he and his partner were driving around in their patrol car and saw a good-looking young man, they would ask for his ID and then order him to come with them to the police station. Then, instead of going to the station, they would take him into the bushes, lower his pants, and suck his member.
Samuel’s gatherings were not only literary but also erotic. Sometimes the bishop himself would come out of his residence in the church gardens to find ten or twelve young men in Samuel’s cell. Samuel would tell him they were studying the Book of Common Prayer, used to teach catechism in that church. The communiqué we prepared covered the orgies and described them in even more sinister terms, including this: “At midnight you could hear the most extraordinary moans through the sacred halls, coming from the strangest of copulations.” Then we listed the names of the participants in these orgies, a sort of Black Mass that took place after midnight at the Episcopal church. Each of the participants was described with an appropriate epithet, as for example, Rafael Arnés: antisocial, lecherous matron; Urania Bicha: wanton wench; Aristóteles Pumariega: inveterate satyr; Manuel Baldín: driveling queen; Cristina Fernández: a.k.a. the Hercules from Trinidad; Nancy Padregón: foul-mouthed cross-dresser who parodies “Sóngoro Cosongo”* in the cathedral; Reinaldo Arenas: ex-fugitive and outlaw; Hiram Prado: transvestite.
We included ourselves in that list as a cover-up, and Hiram, who then pretended to be an intimate friend of Samuel, told him that Pepe was preparing an anonymous missive against him that would be spread all around. The anonymous letter ended by stating that Samuel Toca, dressed in full religious garb, would stand at the door and hand out to each participant a copy of the Book of Common Prayer.
This letter circulated throughout Havana, and one of the first persons to receive it was the Episcopal bishop. As if that were not enough, one day when mass was to be celebrated, the letter was posted at the church door for all to read. Most of those who read it added their own contributions, making it something like a novel. Samuel was furious, and the bishop called him and asked for an explanation.
The letter mentioned another Dantesque individual known as Marisol Lagunos, who was also an assistant or altar boy at the church, and whose name was listed with the comment “illegal streetwalker.” One day the bishop got up at dawn and found Marisol completely naked and being fucked behind the main altar by a huge Negro. The bishop expelled him from the church and told Samuel Toca that he had only thirty days to vacate his room.
Samuel showed up at Pepe Malas’s home with his black umbrella and accompanied by Cristina, who started punching Pepe while the latter threatened to call the police, swearing he had not written that letter. Marta Carriles came out in Pepe’s defense and started a fistfight with Cristina.
Pepe had several of his teeth broken by the blows, but Samuel also took some slaps from Marta Carriles. In any case, no one took the letter seriously, and Samuel continued living in the church.
Amando García had moved to a room in the house of the painter Eduardo Michelson; the place was like a queers’ den. When Amando moved in, he asked me to stay with him for a few days to help him fix it up.
One night Michelson handed out all kinds of weapons to his tenants: hammers, machetes, knives. He was expecting a lover that evening who was a real thug; if Michelson yelled, we were to take the weapons and run to his aid. Fortunately, he did not have to yell.
During the International Youth and Student Festival, Michelson decided to hold a mini-festival of his own; it was, of course, a clandestine event to which only trustworthy people were invited. I took Muhammad and Hiram Prado as my special guests.
We all had to present a little skit, and with the help of Muhammad and Hiram Prado who acted as my chorus, I gave my impressions of the four major categories of gays in Cuba.
The party continued into the next day; we were starving, but no one dared go out in the street. The Defense Committees were watching every block so that no antisocial elements would be seen by the foreigners who had come to the Festival. Finally Pedro Juan, one of Michelson’s tenants, decided to dress as a man and he went out disguised as a militiaman, stood in a long line, and bought a few packages of spaghetti. We cooked the whole thing in the tub. Michelson had a gallon of booze stashed away, but when he went for it he discovered that there was actually a gallon of water instead; he began to rant and rave and finally threw everybody out of his house, including those who lived there and paid rent to him.
At that moment stones rained on the house, smashing the few unbroken windowpanes left. Michelson told us not to worry, because that rock storm was a daily occurrence; it was the way some of his neighbors expressed their disapproval.
Fearing that the police would burst into the house at any moment, I decided to go to Matanzas, to Roberto Valero’s home, until the Festival was over. Since the closing of Blanca’s hole I had a friendly as well as business relationship with Valero; I would take clothes purchased on the black market or sent by Margarita and Jorge, and sell them in Matanzas with the help of Roberto, who would act as middleman. In Matanzas we also picked lemons and all kinds of fruit, which I would then sell in Havana.
When I arrived in Matanzas, Valero had been arrested by State Security, and his wife was terrified. For two days we had no news of him; they had searched his house but fortunately had not found anything really incriminating. The night of his release we went to Carilda’s house; she was holding one of her secret gatherings at her home in Matanzas. Carilda, like Elia del Calvo, had a houseful of cats. At those gatherings she would read long poems, some loaded with marvelous tackiness but beautiful nonetheless; she had no limits, and for that reason frequently reached the point of being ridiculous. While she was reading, her cats did not just jump but almost flew around her.
Carilda’s lover, much younger than she was and completely nuts, would parody her verses with a heavy baritone voice. A former singer of the lyric theater, he had had to give up his profession because of a nervous disorder.
Carilda whispered to us that she was very worried because her husband had drunk thirty-five glasses of water that night; he had some kind of prostate problem and was constantly drinking water. In addition to this passion for water, he had another weakness; he collected sabers. He had a room full of them, and assured us that one of the sabers had belonged to General Martínez Campos.
Dawn came and Carilda was still reading her endless poems. She saved the most erotic ones for last, like the one reading: “When I touch you with the tip of my tits, it addles my wits, my love. It addles my wits.”
After she finished reading everything she had recently written, she announced that those poems were a world-premiere event on that early morning in Matanzas. One of the poems had a markedly pornographic theme, and Carilda’s husband interrupted her all of a sudden with the saber of Martínez Campos in his hands, yelling: “I told you, bitch, not to read that poem!” Carilda, unflappable, continued reading. He swung the saber around in the air several times, and hit one of the cats. It was then that Carilda lost patience and said: “I’ll let you do anything except abuse my cats; this is my house and here I do as I please.” And to prove it, she took off her robe and stood there in her panties. Her husband brandished the saber ever closer to Carilda until he hit her on the back. She screamed and ran out into the street in her panties, pursued by her husband shouting: “Stop, bitch!” Carilda begged: “Please, kill me, but don’t cause such a scandal in my hometown.” But husband and wife continued their outlandish spectacle, disappearing from view in the streets of Matanzas.
The next day I gathered my profits from the sale of clothes that Valero had made among his friends; he himself had purchased a shirt from India that went all the way down to his knees, though he later confessed that the material was too old and rotted. I returned to Havana and, once in my room, locked myself in with a padlock; it was a technique I had developed some time ago to throw any cop or unwelcome visitor off track. Since the door had a hatch that led to the loft, I could close the door with three or four padlocks at once, and also post a note saying that I was not home; I would then climb through the hatch into the loft. No one could possibly suspect that I was in the room.
At dawn I heard somebody trying to force the door open. I looked out cautiously through the hatch and saw a huge black man (he had been one of my lovers during the last six months) who, confident there was no one home, was trying to pry the door open. I quietly took out a club stored under the bed for emergency self-defense, opened the hatch, and hit him over the head so hard it knocked him down. The blow had caught him off guard; he did not know where it came from because, immediately afterward, I had closed the hatch again.
The black man got up, and I opened the hatch and whacked him once more. This time he did not stay to find out where the mysterious blows were coming from, but ran away. He never returned; perhaps he thought the blows were the result of some diabolic or invisible power I possessed.
Only Lázaro knew when I was in my room, and he sometimes brought me food he had stolen from Marta. When the Festival was over, I removed the locks; the general situation became more difficult then because the Festival had totally ruined the country and there was nothing to eat. My own circumstances were worse because I could not get a job. In that crisis my only company were the two turtles that Marta Carriles had given me. For some time I had been feeling sorry for those starving animals; in a way they symbolized my own life. One afternoon I put them in a bag and went to the zoo to release them in the turtle pond, but then I realized that if the guards at the zoo saw me with the turtles, they would think I was stealing them and I would go to jail. There was so much hunger that people frequently stole animals from the zoo to eat them; that was true for the people who killed the lion. Finally, I placed the turtles on the ground; those turtles ran, almost flew over the sand; I never saw two animals so happy and full of energy. They ran until they sank into the water and disappeared in the pond with the other turtles. I felt a great sense of relief. When a few minutes later a heavy downpour flooded the streets of Havana, I ran happily in the rain.
At the Episcopal church there was another scandal similar to the one with Marisol Lagunos. The occasion was a church ceremony in which all the novices and those wanting to be priests could wear their fanciest robes. On that day Toca dressed in white and wore a green cap, which was evidently not his own; he looked like an apparition from a Scandinavian nightmare. Samuel had begged all his friends to come and see him in his full regalia. He had always been an exhibitionist.
The ceremony started, Samuel showed off his splendid attire, the bishop gave his sermon, and then organ music began to flow through the temple. All of a sudden, while the nun kept playing the instrument proficiently, the expected tones were not coming out of that organ; there were only some weird sounds. The choir stopped and although the nun persisted in trying to play her melody, the instrument produced only an infernal noise.
Most of us, including the bishop, went up to the organ pipes and found out what had happened: Hiram Prado, buck naked, was being fucked by the black gardener, and while they were at it, Hiram was hitting and kicking the organ pipes. I do not know if it was due to his state of ecstasy or because the black man’s penis was so big that it made Hiram bang the pipes in that manner; the fact is that in the entire history of the Episcopal church nothing like that had ever happened. Hiram and his black paramour fled naked through the gardens.
But the bishop, who knew that Samuel had invited Hiram, asked him the same afternoon to vacate his cell. Samuel said he needed a month to move out and threatened to resort to the offices of Urban Reform. I do not know how he managed it, but he was able to extend his stay at the church for three more months.
It was then 1979 and, as fate decreed, Fidel Castro had decided to get rid of some former political prisoners, many of whom were unimportant. Samuel Toca was one of those former prisoners who received an exit permit. Samuel immediately put on the airs of a great personage; it was he who was going to the free world. Even the bishop gave him a small good-bye party and we again paid Samuel a visit at the church to bid him farewell.
I managed to speak with him in private, and asked him to send a message to my friends Jorge and Margarita to please do all they could to get me out of the country secretly; I asked him to warn them to be very discreet in whatever they did.
As soon as Samuel arrived in Europe he immediately published in the press everything I had asked him to keep secret. A week after Samuel’s departure, Víctor came to my room with a copy of Cambio 16 from Spain. There it was, in large headlines: REINALDO ARENAS THREATENS SUICIDE IF NOT HELPED OUT OF CUBA. This is the way that Samuel kept the secret I had confided to him; he had simply used my name and friendship to gain access to the Spanish and French press.
Margarita and Jorge Camacho put him up for over a month. In October, after they realized that he had no plans to move, they asked him, very diplomatically, when was he intending to leave. Samuel replied, perhaps by the end of the year. I wrote to Margarita and Jorge telling them everything Samuel had done, and they, already aware of what kind of person he was, put him out on the street, but not without first giving him money so that he could move to a hotel.
From the moment he arrived in Europe, Samuel began writing us startling letters; he knew that all our mail was censored by State Security; he even wrote to some people at their place of work or at the university. Everything he wrote was meant to harm us. In one letter he told me that he had done everything possible to get me out of Cuba, that he had talked with Olga, my French friend, to see if it would be possible to get me out as a stowaway on a merchant vessel.
In a letter to Valero he wrote: “I trust you are still meeting at the Episcopal church or at some other place for the counterrevolutionary gatherings that we used to hold every night.” He wrote a similar letter to Juan Peñate which cost him his job and, in the end, led to his confinement in an insane asylum.
Valero was then expelled from the university, and as a result, he was sent to prison. There was no place I could be expelled from, and to put me in jail again would have caused further scandal, but I was being watched closer than ever and Víctor told me that if anything similar happened again, they would have no pity whatsoever for me. Of course, I told him that I knew nothing of the matter, that Samuel had done all that to harm me.
Around the same time, Virgilio Piñera received a visit from State Security. They insulted and abused him, and took all his manuscripts, forbidding him to hold any kind of public reading. From then on, he sank into silent, anguished terror.
It was Rafael Arnés who had been reporting that Virgilio’s readings were counterrevolutionary; I was able to verify this later when his friend René Cifuentes, now in exile, confirmed it to me.