CUBA: Chief Executioner

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After taking Holy Week off, Captain Herman Marks, 37, an ex-convict from Milwaukee who fought with Fidel Castro's rebels, got back on the job one night last week. Consulting his written orders, he marched with an armed guard to the death row of Havana's gloomy Cabana Fortress, brought out three former policemen, all convicted in military courts on charges of murder. A short ride in a bus and a jeep brought Marks, the guards, a priest and the prisoners to within 200 feet of an old moat, 20 feet deep and surrounded on three sides by high stone walls. A six-man firing squad waited on a spot worn bare of grass.

Under the glare of three floodlights, Marks marched former Batista Police Lieut. Eloy Contreras to a bullet-scarred wall, 36 feet from the firing squad. "Atención!" yelled Marks at 1:13 a.m. "Preparen . . . apunten . . . fuego!" After the volley, Marks stepped up to Contreras' writhing body, fired the coup de grâce with his .45 automatic—then had to shoot two more times before his man finally died. Guards took off Contreras' shoes, fingerprinted him, placed him in a plain wooden coffin, and loaded him aboard a hearse for delivery to waiting relatives. By 1:55 a.m., all three prisoners were dead, and Marks's work was ended for the night. "Execution is not a pleasant task," says Castro's chief executioner, "but a necessary one."

Later in the week, firing squads through the island shot 13 more men, raising the execution toll to 475. "War crimes" courts worked around the clock to clean up "hundreds of pending cases."

Marks is no newcomer to unpleasantness. His U.S. police record includes 32 arrests, from Long Beach, Calif. to Bangor, Me. on charges ranging from drunkenness, vagrancy and assault to auto theft and draft dodging. He escaped from a Wisconsin reform school in 1938, from an Ohio jail in 1946, from a California industrial farm in 1950. Finally, he did 3½ years in the Wisconsin pen for raping a 17-year-old girl. Warden John C. Burke remembers him as "a real stinker."

Behind this sordid record lies the soul of a romantic. On his left arm Marks wears a tattooed double heart inscribed "Love, Nellie." On his right is an eight-inch snake coiled about a dagger stuck through the top of a skull and bearing Marks's motto, which happens to be "Death Before Dishonor."