The three miracles of Víctor de Yurre

Carlos Alberto Montaner

According to Catholic tradition, to determine the sanctity of a good man, three miracles are required. That's the case of Víctor de Yurre. I can attest to that. I declared him a saint without waiting for approval from the Vatican and placed him on my private altar a long time ago. He has just died in Miami. He was 86 years old and was extraordinarily affectionate. He leaves a wife and two brilliant children. He was one of the three mayors of Havana after Batista fled. To him I owe my life and the fact that I'm a free person.

When Castro betrayed the revolution and derailed it toward communism, De Yurre broke publicly with the government and went to the opposition. But even though he was outside power and engaged in discreet conspiratorial tasks, Víctor maintained good relations with the ruling circles and used them with extreme generosity to protect people who were hunted down and help them to escape from the country. The political police watched him closely, but he knew how to cover his tracks. In early 1961, my mother and my mother-in-law went to see him, desperate. They were his friends and told him what had happened: I had been arrested, along with three other students, and they feared I might be brought before a firing squad. The charges were as vague as “conspiring against the powers of the State,” but in those awful times the regime killed over mere suspicions, or to set an example to the terrified population.

Víctor's first miracle was to make sure that the laws were not broken. In Cuba, just obeying the law is a miracle. At that time, I was 17 and the penal code forbade imposing the death penalty on youths 18 and below, but we all knew that the State constantly violated its own rules and killed teenagers. Víctor went to see a Comandante friend of his who owed him a favor and asked him something simple and, for me, vital: enforce the law. After all, I was merely an insignificant student without any hierarchy in the opposition. We were all sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment, although someone must have been discontent with my sentence because something unusual happened. One afternoon, they took me out of my cell in handcuffs and took me to a doctor so he could take X-rays of my joints and demonstrate that, in fact, I was older than my stated age. I never knew who was so insistent on having me shot. At that age, I didn't think I had any personal enemies. Fortunately, the ploy failed.

Víctor de Yurre's second miracle was to secure my transfer to a prison for minors, outside Havana. During the republic, it was known as “Torrens” but the revolution had renamed it “Piti Fajardo,” in honor of a doctor who had died in combat against the anticommunist peasant guerrillas. That prison had a wing for young political prisoners, where the youngest inmate was 11 and the oldest were 17. Some old-time common prisoners had become trusties, a wonderful metamorphosis that allowed me to buy a metal saw from one of them, for a dollar.

Great. I had a tool to saw the bars of my cell, but faced a problem that apparently had no solution. Torrens was at the center of a large plot of land surrounded by a wire fence. I had to escape from the cell, walk past the prison buildings, across the open land, over the fence and reach the city before the patrols could recapture me. To do that, I needed an automobile that would not be noticed at night, near the compound.

Víctor de Yurre performed his third miracle. He visited an officer of the Rebel Army and stated his problem: he asked the officer to pick up, in his military jeep, on some neighborhood road, “a young man who will try to escape next Wednesday at dawn.” The rebel officer, who was a staunch anticommunist, valiantly agreed. Had we been captured, he would have been executed without hesitation. The story is very intense and too long to tell in this article, but finally, on the appointed night, two young men climbed into the jeep, sweaty and scared: Rafael Gerada, a former guerrilla wounded in combat, was one. I was the other. A few days later, we gained asylum in a Latin American embassy in Havana. Some months later, we left Cuba to enjoy freedom. Life had given us a second chance. Saint Víctor de Yurre had made it all possible.

October 23, 2007

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