Free Cuba

Today, the IAPA calls for unrestricted news access in Cuba and the release of 25 jailed journalists.  I join their call, but I also call for the release of all Cuban prisoners, both those behind bars in one of castro's hell hole prisons and those serving a life sentence without freedom and human rights simply by the fact of having been born in Cuba, an island of communist oppression.

In November 2003 Front Page Magazine's David Horowitz presented the Annie Taylor Award  to Armando Valladares, a former political prisoner in Cuba.  His words bear witness to the horror of castro's gulag as well as his own nobility.  From that presentation:

David Horowitz: I am deeply honored to be presenting the Annie Taylor Award to Armando Valladares, and there's a special irony in the fact that I am the one to do so.  We are separated by only about two years in age, and in the year 1960, both of us were young men setting out in life, I as a graduate student in Berkeley and he as a young poet who worked in the Postal Savings Bank, which was part of the Ministry of Communications in the new revolutionary government of Cuba.

In Berkeley, I was the new Left radical cheering on Cuba's regime because its charismatic leader, Fidel Castro, was promising that the revolution would be neither a dictatorship of a left nor right, neither red nor black, but Cuban olive green.

Fidel Castro had already visited the United States as Cuba's new leader. When he was asked by NBC reporter Lawrence Spivak whether he was a communist, Fidel had said, "Democracy is my ideal.  I am not a communist.  I have no hesitation in choosing between democracy and communism."

Early one morning in the year 1960, Armando Valladares, who was 23 years old and still asleep in his parents' house, was wakened by the cold barrel of a machine gun pressing his head into the pillow on his bed.  There were three gunmen standing over him.  A fourth kept watch on Valladares' mother and sister in another room in the house.  These men were agents of Castro's new political police.  After ordering Valladares to get dressed, they took him away.

Armando Valladares' crime was this:  Castro had been appointing communists to his new government even though he had sworn that his revolution would bring freedom to Cuba.  Many people in Cuba who supported the revolution were concerned.  Some were saying that Castro was a communist himself.  To combat these fears, Castro had his agents print up a slogan.  He had them put it on decals, bumper stickers, tin plaques, wall posters, and in the daily press.  The slogan was this:  "If Fidel is a communist, then put me on the list.  He's got the right idea." 

The communists of the Ministry of Communications came to the Postal Savings Bank and to the desk of Armando Valladares.  They handed him a card bearing the slogan and told him to put it on his worktable.  The 23-year-old Valladares refused.  Taken aback, the communists asked him if he had anything against Castro.  Valladares answered that if Castro was a communist, he did. 

For this crime, Armando Valladares was sentenced to 30 years in prison.  Like all of Castro's political prisoners, he was tortured and humiliated.  He was made to eat other men's excrement and forced to watch his friends die.  One of Valladares' prison friends was a youngster named Roberto Lopez Chavez.  He was just a kid, and he went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses.  The guards denied him water until he became delirious, twisting on the floor of his cell and begging for a drink.  The guards urinated in his mouth and on his face, and he died the following day. 

The political prisoners in Castro's jails were given a choice.  You could be rehabilitated and save yourself from these torments if you renounced who you were.  All you had to say was, "I have been wrong.  All my life has been a mistake.  God does not exist.  I want you to give me this opportunity to join a communist society."  Of Cuba's 80,000 political prisoners, 70,000 took this path of rehabilitation.  Armando Valladares was not one of them.  "For me," he said, "that would've meant spiritual suicide.  All the time I was in jail, I never gave up my freedom. My freedom is not the space where you can walk around. There are lots of people in Cuba who have space to walk, and they are not free." 

Describing his incarceration, Valladares said, "For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instil in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.”

Another prisoner named Fernando Lopez del Toro came to Valladares and said in despair that what hurt him most about the torment, the beatings, the hunger was to think that all their suffering was useless.  Fernando Lopez del Toro was not broken by the pain, Valladares recalled, but by the futility of the pain.  Fernando eventually took his own life.  "Remember him," Valladares said, "the only thing that keeps us firm is to know that somewhere else there is another soul that loves us, that respects us, and that is fighting for the return of the dignity that has been taken from us." 

Twenty-two years after his arrest, after an appeal from French President Francois Mitterand, Armando Valladares was able to return home a free man.  He did not forget Fernando Lopez del Toro.  He went on a world campaign to bring to light the terrible fate of Castro's political prisoners.  He published an account of his experiences, a book, to which he gave the title, Against All Hope. In 1987, President Reagan named him the United States Representative to the United Nations' Human Rights Commission with the rank of Ambassador. 

Ambassador Valladares persuaded the UN to conduct an investigation of the terrible conditions in Castro's jails.  He exposed to the whole world the inhumanity he had witnessed.  To the UN Commission he said, "We must enter the cell of every Fernando Lopez del Toro in the world, embrace him in solidarity, and tell them to their faces, ‘Do not take your life.  There are men of goodwill who are standing by you.  Your dignity as a human being will prevail.’"

Please be one of those men of goodwill and and stand up for the rights of not just those Cuban's locked away in castro's gulags, but for all Cubans confined behind the iron wall of communist Cuba.  Please, their voice is silenced but we hear their hearts cry for freedom;  please join our online efforts to have their voices heard.

Read more here, here, here, here, here, and at the other sites listed in my sidebar.

Comments

[Tomas Estrada-Palma]

Nice blog!

[ronnie gibson]

im trying to reach armando valladares my dad was a american in cuba in jal with him he was one of the six americans on the yact aries that was running guns to fight castro he was thear for 3 years i wood like to see what he nowes abought my dad i nead his emale or phone number it wood be nice to talk to some one that was thear with him my dads name was alford eugene gibson can you help me thanks ronnie gibson