When Fidel Castro led the Cuban Revolution, he declared that he was not a communist. But when he came to power in 1959, he proved to be one of the staunchest advocates for the ideology. Luis Zuñiga, born in Havana 11 years before Castro’s coup, was never enchanted by Castro’s or communism’s promises. He instead worked to resist and possibly overthrow the new regime. His so-called “counter-revolutionary” activities resulted in imprisonment.
Zuñiga is now a prominent voice in the world for freedom and democracy, but he first had to secure his own freedom. He had to escape from Castro’s Cuba.
The Plan
“I was scared. I decided to do it and that was it. I did not want to spend my life in prison.”
It was 1969. Castro had been in power for a decade. By now, both dissenting revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries had been executed, imprisoned, or exiled. The Bay of Pigs Invasion had long since failed. The Cuban Missile Crisis had concluded seven years prior. The island nation was now a bastion of totalitarianism.
Zuñiga, the young, 22-year-old anticommunist, sat in a prison cell in the middle of a country that had itself become a prison. He had been appropriately labeled a “plantado”: a political prisoner who refused to succumb to communist reeducation and indoctrination.
Enduring solitary confinement, starvation, and beatings, Zuñiga spent two years languishing in Manacas Prison. In two months, he formulated his escape plan.
The first phase of his plan was reaching the infirmary in Santa Clara; but he needed a reason to go there. “A doctor friend told me to put pressure on my thigh and tap on it constantly, but don’t leave any bruising,” he said. “It will look like an infection, like lymphangitis.”
Zuñiga tied a piece of cloth around his thigh to swell and discolor his leg. The prison provided him antibiotics to remove the “infection.” Zuñiga kept at it; prison officials decided to move him to the infirmary. Phase one in a long and dangerous adventure had succeeded.
The Infirmary
Before he arrived at the infirmary in November 1972, he had been given the layout of the building and the surrounding city. Seven-foot-high walls surrounded the clinic. A guard was stationed on each side of the building, with an additional guard under the second floor window.
Zuñiga entered the second floor where the prisoners were housed. He eyed the barred window. He snuck in a 3.5-inch piece of saw to cut the bars. He planned to start cutting through the bars the first night.
He was fortunate. The prisoner next to the window was Jose Rafael Machado, a member of the 2506 Brigade who participated in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
“I told him I wanted to escape so I needed access to the window,” Zuñiga recalled. “He said, ‘No problem at all. What I will do is cover you so that you may cut through the bars.’”
When night fell, Zuñiga began. As he sawed on the bars, Machado talked and watched the other side, where a guard holding an AK-47 stood. Zuñiga wrapped a handkerchief around the bar to help muffle the noise. While he sawed with one hand, he held a spoon in the other as a mirror to keep an eye on the guard below the window.
Throughout the few days and nights, the plantado would study the movements of the guards, specifically the ones stationed below the window. The guards were on four-hour shifts. The night-shift guard was a godsend, as he was the only one who would walk around the clinic instead of pacing back and forth.
The trick was to cut the bars from behind, but to not cut them completely on any one end. The bars needed to remain somewhat intact because a guard would check the bars each day by hitting against them. It took him three days to cut through three bars. On the fourth night, Zuñiga made his escape.
Escaping Santa Clara
At 6 p.m. on the fourth night, the night-shift guard arrived. At 7 p.m., as darkness fell, Zuñiga began tying sheets together to lower himself out of the window. He crept toward the window, sliced through the remnants of the bars, and began to pull them toward him. Suddenly, he heard a voice whisper in his ear.
“I’m going with you.” It was Rigoberto Gonzalez Sarduy, a guerilla soldier-turned-prisoner. Zuñiga had already planned the escape and knew he had no more than four minutes to climb down the window, run to the 7-foot-high wall, and clear it. Sarduy’s suggestion was preposterous. “But he said, ‘No matter what, I’m going with you,’” Zuñiga remembered.
Zuñiga relented. Having pulled the bars back, he waited for the guard to start toward the corner. Every second was precious. The moment the guard began to turn the corner, Zuñiga began making his way out. He lowered himself slowly outside of the window and onto the ground. Sarduy quickly followed, but he was moving too fast. Indeed, he was falling.
Sarduy hit the ground. There was a crack. Sarduy had fractured his ankle. An imposition had now turned into disaster. Somehow, Sarduy had kept from screaming out in pain. The two prisoners were outside of the clinic, but now they had to make the wall and clear it. With adrenaline coursing through his veins, Zuñiga lifted Sarduy onto his shoulders and carried him to the wall. He lifted his comrade to the top of the wall. Sarduy pulled himself while Zuñiga pushed, and over the wall he went. Zuñiga only had seconds to spare. He jumped. Placing his hands atop the wall, he pulled and leapt to the other side. “As soon as I got on the other side, I heard footsteps on the gravel,” he said. “I heard years later that Machado pulled up the sheets and pushed the bars back to keep the guard from seeing.” Machado had bought him at least a couple more hours. Phase two was complete, but the escape had just begun.
Zuñiga had to reach Havana, the capital city. Santa Clara is in the middle of the island and about 175 miles away. Zuñiga and Sarduy made their way out of the city through a dried canal. Zuñiga tried to convince Sarduy to come to Havana, but he declined. Sarduy decided to go to Manicaragua, south of Santa Clara, where he believed he would be safe, and where he could recover from his injury and not be a burden to Zuñiga.
Zuñiga took his compatriot to a small farm belonging to Sarduy’s cousin, then sprinted toward a bus supply station. A fellow prisoner had previously given him a tip: If a bus had an empty seat, they would let him on. Luck would find him at midnight. He encountered a young girl on her way to the bus. He asked if he could help with her luggage.
“I was now not a suspicious guy because I had luggage and was walking with a girl,” Zuñiga said. The second bus that arrived had several seats available. “I gave the driver a 10 dollar peso to let me out at the light before reaching the Havana station.”
He arrived in the capital city at 7 a.m. His brother was a doctor in Havana. But the first call he made from a local pay phone was to Orlando Misas, the brother of fellow prisoner Ulises Misas. Orlando Misas picked up Zuñiga and took him to an old port. There were several apartments often rented by sailors. Misas told the owner that Zuñiga was his cousin visiting Havana for healthcare treatment. While in the apartment, Misas handed him an ID. Zuñiga’s brother had forged the document with a false name and a family photo pasted onto it.
Zuñiga prepared to make the final phase of his escape to the opposite end of the island: Guantanamo Bay.
An Impossible Escape
It was now December. As Zuñiga readied to leave Havana, he was informed that three others wished to join him. Having accumulated much-needed supplies for the long trek ahead, the four boarded a train to Santiago de Cuba on the southeastern coast. A direct journey to Guantanamo would have aroused suspicions. They dressed as sugar cane workers (Zuñiga also carried a machete) and avoided each other while traveling.
When the train arrived in Santiago, they boarded another train to San Luis, only a couple dozen miles north. From San Luis, they departed for Guantanamo. The four disembarked at the stop before Guantanamo and began their march east around the city to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
After five days on foot, traveling mainly at night, they reached Boqueron near Guantanamo Bay. Three barbed wire fence lines separated Cuba from American soil. The most dangerous part of Zuñiga’s escape was before him.
Cement undergirded each fence line. Stationed at intervals along the fences were armed sentries. Each fence was 10 yards apart. Between the first and second fence were guards with German shepherds. Between the second and third was a minefield. Before he escaped, a fellow prisoner, who had been an officer along the fence system and was arrested on suspicion of slipping family members through, briefed him on the layout of the mines. There were 10 rows of mines in the design of a “dice’s five side.”
The four remained shrouded in the mountainous foliage until the new moon. When night fell, they doused themselves with petroleum to ward off the German shepherds, then scrambled to the fenceline. With a two-foot plastic tube cut on one side, the men wrapped the barbed wire, pulled down on the wire with a rope, and let each one pass through. All four were able to elude the dogs and get through the second fence.
Zuñiga had seemingly planned for everything. Even the machete was used for more than a disguise. Down on their knees and elbows, they held onto the back of each other’s shirts, while Zuñiga used the machete to cautiously dig for mines.
Clink. The machete tapped the edge of a mine. Zuñiga recalculated at 45 degrees and moved forward. In the pitch of night, incapable of even seeing the machete, Zuñiga inched forward, the others silently in tow. They moved past the first row of mines, then the second, and then the third. They had reached the third and final fence.
Slipping through the barbed wire, they were free. The American side was 100 yards away. Caution, however, advised them not to let their guard down. They had been told to anticipate a lot of vegetation after the third fence, but they could find none. The area felt freshly mowed. Something wasn’t right. “I believed we should keep digging as if there were mines,” Zuñiga said. “I suddenly stopped. I cannot tell you why. I knew I had something in front of me. There was a wire. I had a glove and I followed the wire, but there was no mine connected to it.”
Leaving nothing to chance, they slid under and slowly made their way forward until they stood among the vegetation. A sigh of relief swept through them. When they reached a chain link fence, a truck drove up. They were Americans. “They asked us where we came from. They said, ‘You came through the minefield?’” Zuñiga said with a laugh. “They took us to the headquarters. They gave us coffee and sandwiches. We were the entertainment. They wanted to be told the whole story.”
All four remained with the Americans until early January. While they told their stories, Zuñiga had his own question. “I asked what the wire was,” he said, referring to the wire after the third fence. “They said, ‘If you had pulled that wire, the largest part of you to be found would have been about a square inch.’ It was a minefield to blow up tanks.”
Several weeks prior to Zuñiga’s escape, the Cubans had noticed American ships landing dozens of tanks. Fearing an invasion, the Cubans laid down trip-wired mines 2 1/2 feet in diameter.
When he thought about the mines, the German shepherds, the sentries, the guards at the clinic—enduring a journey that crossed the island one and a half times—he reflected: “It was an adventure. I thank the Lord. His hand was on me the whole time. Otherwise, I would have died during the process.”
Luis Zuñiga arrived in Miami shortly after his escape from Cuba. While working at the Miami International Airport, he applied for scholarships to return to school. A university in Texas extended him an invitation, but by then, Zuñiga was already back in a Cuban prison. Only eight months after his arrival in America, he and two former political prisoners tried to infiltrate their homeland in order to rescue Cubans who were in hiding.
Zuñiga was caught and sentenced to 25 years. After spending 14 years in prison, he was released in November 1988 as part of Pope John Paul II’s condition for visiting Cuba. His release was negotiated by the late Cardinal John O’Connor, the archbishop of New York, and Fidel Castro, who agreed to the condition of releasing Zuñiga and two other political prisoners.
To this day, Zuñiga, who now lives in Miami, continues to advocate for freedom and democracy in Cuba.
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
