n 1960, a 23-year-old postal bank inspector, Armando Valladares, was thrown into prison for refusing to compromise his Catholicism and political beliefs in favor of the increasingly repressive Castro regime in Cuba. Valladares received his 30-year sentence as a "counter revolutionary" because he would not place the placard "If Fidel is a communist, then put me on the list. He's got the right idea." on his desk. Valladares told Castro's agents, who had demanded that he conform, that he did not support Castro's communism.
For his honesty and courage Valladares was thrown into Cuba's notorious Isla de Pinos prison where he was subjected to the most inhumane conditions. In the 22 years he languished in prison, Valladares watched as his fellow prisoners were destroyed mentally, morally, or executed outright. Valladares counseled the Isla de Pinos inmates to stay true to their faith and not renounce God.
Valladares revealed his intense spiritual strength to resist communist indoctrination by saying, "For me 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. 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 instill 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."
Besides prayer, Valladares wrote poetry, which was smuggled out of his prison cell and published in Europe. Thanks to his poems Valladares became Cuba's most famous prisoner of conscious and came to the attention of French President Francois Mitterand, who secured Valladares' release in 1982 after serving 22 years of his sentence. Valladares published his collected poems as Against All Hope and campaigned ceaselessly to expose the plight of Castro's political prisoners.
Appointed in 1987 as a United States Representative to the United Nations' Human Rights Commission under President Ronald Reagan, Ambassador Armando Valladares successfully got the UN to investigate Castro's prison system and exposed its horrific conditions. In memory of another inmate, who had killed himself in despair, Valladares declared, "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.'"
Armando Valladares continues to speak out against Castro's repressive regime and has updated his Against All Hopeto include little Elian Gonzalez as a political prisoner used shamelessly by Castro as a tool of the state. Castro recently dominated the young boy's 10th birthday party with a two hour political propaganda tirade against the United States.
Valladares has also taken to task those religious leaders in the United States, who have been fooled or seduced by the blandishments of the left and Castro by stating, "During those years, with the purpose of forcing us to abandon our religious beliefs and to demoralize us, the Cuban Communist indoctrinators repeatedly used the statements made by some representatives of the American Christian churches. Every time a pamphlet was published in U.S., every time a clergyman would write an article in support of 's dictatorship, a translation would be given to us, and that was far worse for the Christian political prisoners than the beatings or the hunger. Incomprehensible to us, while we waited for the embrace of solidarity from our brothers in Christ, those who were embraced were our tormentors."
