Revolt of the Ingrates

Many sentimental Cubans were saddened when a U.S. belly dancer named Patricia ("Satira") Schmidt got a 15-year sentence for killing her yachtsman-lover in Havana two years ago. They not only thought that the penalty was outrageous, they were grieved by the fact that she was sentenced to serve the time in the old Guanabacoa prison. After she had spent 18 months there, President Ramon Grau San Martin set Satira free.

Habaneros felt that their dark, dank, dungeonlike women's jail was no place to send a good-looking girl. There were no individual cells; inmates were mainly crowded into six foul, ground-level wards, as many as 25 to the ward. Each ward had one unshielded toilet in the corner. No one was more dissatisfied with Guanabacoa, or worked harder to get a modern jail, than Director Dr. Carmelina Guanche. In 1945, the government began to build such a prison.

Last month Dr. Guanche's million-dollar new Reclusorio Nacional de Mujeres was ready for occupants. The prisoners who were moved there found it a spacious, sunlit, flower-hedged cluster of white buildings 27 miles west of Havana. For each inmate there was an airy, pastel-tinted cell, with toilet and hot & cold running water. Dinner was eaten, tearoom fashion, at small, flower-decorated tables. Reclusorio has a nursery and playground for children of prisoners, and a basketball court. For trusties, there is even a beauty parlor.

But not all the 170 prisoners took to Dr. Guanche's model clink. Many of them --madams, streetwalkers and homicidal housewives--set up a hullabaloo the minute they moved in. Locked up nightly in their blue-green-tinted rooms, they howled last week for the earthy gabfests, the feuds and hairpullings of the old bullpens. "I'll take Guanabacoa any time," rasped an ex-dope peddler. "Prison is prison," yelled another ingrate, "and I like mine with company."

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