Armando Valladares provides a scorching indictment, here, of the human rights inferno in Castro's Cuba. And all the while the international left has given its blessing. Is anyone surprised.
In my leftist, or apolitical, days, I visited Cuba 4 times. Three times I went to Cienfuegos, and once to Santiago de Cuba. I was drawn by the old Spanish architecture, the slower pace, the 50's era cars -- the usual elements turistas are fascinated by. Castro's 'gulag' is not visible to tourists. Only once did the cell door swing open, suggesting the routine crimes within.
I'd made the mistake of exchanging US dollars for local pesos, through a middleman on the street. Somehow the authorities heard of it. I found myself a day later sitting in a large room, 20 feet from a police questioner. I admitted I had changed the money, but pled ignorance that this was not allowed for foreigners. Fortunately he decided not to take the matter any further. I recall vividly the air of menace & arbitrary power in that brief interview.
Needless to say, Armando Valladares was not so lucky. A year after Castro's revolution, Valladares refused to have a government placard placed on his desk at the post office. At a press conference, and in recent speeches, Castro had been insisting he was a democrat, and would not impose any form of communism on the Cuban people. Valladares took him at his word. The placard read, "If Fidel is a communist, then put me on the list. He's got the right idea." He refused on the basis that communism in Cuba was not a desirable outcome, in his opinion.
Valladares was arrested the next day. Thirteen days later, in Valladares' own words, "I was tried on charges of threatening the powers of state security, even though there was no evidence against me. The justice system under Castro was a mockery of the rule of law; members of my tribunal were Communist Party apparatchiks who sat with their boots up on tables, smoking cigars and reading comic books. Their very presence was but a formality; the verdicts had already been decided. I was not permitted an attorney."
His troubles were only beginning. For 22 years he was to be an inmate in Castro's vast gulag, a prison system tourists like me never see.
"Once in prison, if the guards felt like punishing us, they would put us in cages, with mesh roofs, and walk along the edge while pouring buckets of urine and excrement all over our bodies. Sometimes, guards would shoot prisoners for target practice. That is how they killed Alfredo Carrion and Diosdado Aquit. Many of the men whom Castro had imprisoned, tortured and killed had been his comrades in overthrowing Batista. But most of them were innocent people eliminated in Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's psychotic quest for what he and Castro called the 'new man'.
"The impunity of Castro's dictatorship was marked by its cruelty. A prisoner in my block, Julio Tan, once refused an order by a prison guard to dig weeds. The guard struck him with his bayonet, another hit him with a hoe, and a gang of guards beat him until he bled to death in just a matter of minutes. My friend Pedro Luis Boitel, a student leader and courageous opponent of Batista, went on a hunger strike in 1972 to protest his treatment. On the 49th day of the strike, Castro personally ordered that Boitel be denied drinking water. Boitel died of thirst, in horrific agony, five days later.
"Terror was Castro's main tool. The tactics used for enemies of the regime included the exploitation of phobias such as reptiles and rats; the use of drugs so as to have prisoners lose all notion of time and place; blindfolding prisoners, hanging them by their feet, and then lowering them into wells they were told are filled with crocodiles; the use of guard dogs that had their teeth removed and which were set upon prisoners with hands tied behind their backs. Usually, these dogs attacked the genitals first. All of this was investigated and extensively documented by a visiting delegation from the United Nations. The evidence can be found in Geneva."
Valladares' harrowing story tells us nothing we didn't already know about Fidel's psychotic island paradise, but it does expose the international left for the hypocrites and cowards they truly are.
I'm ashamed to say I was one such hypocrite and coward. I was one such liberal who just wanted to interact with Cubans, and see Cuba, and to hell with the stories of human rights abuses. I'm still shocked at my own political insensitivity. The abuses simply didn't matter to me, b/c I believed it was all in a good cause. How naive I was, to my great shame.
Stephen J Carter | SF Novelist
