Against All Hope, by Armando Valladares
Bukovsky, Vladimir
Books in Review - "Against All Hope, by Armando Valladares" A few years ago in Caracas, Venezuela, as part of our activities with Resistance International, I attended a series of hearings with Armando Valladares on political repression in Nicaragua....
...Since no bath was allowed and no water provided, a crust of filth and fungus would cover your body until after many months "this crust could be peeled off like a scab or like the rind of a fruit...
...And no matter how hard his captors tried to isolate him, to cut off his lifeline, the scraps of paper invariably arrived in Miami, where his wife Martha lived...
...Shifting a fiery gaze from prisoner to prisoner, he spoke rapidly and threateningly in Spanish...
...The event lasted no longer than a minute, but the local police and security guards, apparently insulted by our little publicity stunt, surrounded us when we tried to leave the building...
...A shot in the back is not a solution, for symbols are immortal...
...Valladares's twenty-two years of torment and triumph are now condensed for us in these 380 pages...
...It is as if in Soviet prisons today one could come across White Army officers, old revolutionaries, Trotskyists, and peasant guerrillas serving alongside modern-day dissidents and Jews seeking emigration to Israel...
...Would you arrest me...
...In a time of ultimate crisis a nation needs a symbol to survive...
...Even the hardest of tests, Uke the imprisonment of his father, failed to break Armando's will...
...How to describe being locked in solitary for a year, naked and hungry, awakened each morning with a bucketful of human excrement thrown from above...
...It was at that moment, I am sure, and not before, that Christianity became, more than a religious faith, a way of life for me...
...Yet Against All Hope is an indictment nevertheless...
...Afew years ago in Caracas, Venezuela, as part of our activities with Resistance International, I attended a series of hearings with Armando Valladares on political repression in Nicaragua...
...Against All Hope is a rather dispassionate account...
...Understood this way, the tone of Against All Hope is not at all surprising...
...Indeed, at first the reader might be surprised by the aloofness with which Valladares describes his ordeal...
...What is the point of token resistance by a couple of hundred when miUions have already accepted their fate...
...But it was something they got used to...
...Indeed, under the encouraging influence of the Soviet Union (or perhaps due to Cuba's smaller size), the "revolutionary process" in Cuba covered in twenty-seven years what the Soviet Union has achieved in seventy...
...Moreover, the government still hadn't declared itself Marxist...
...After three days of testimony about persecution of several groups—including lawyers, tradeunionists, human rights activists, Jews—we became particularly concerned with the plight of the Miskito Indians...
...Valladares became one of the plantados, the diehards who would not join the Rehabilitation Program under any circumstances...
...That, of course, was a direct challenge to the regime and therefore meant even more torture, beatings, degradation, and murder...
...The resuh is truly paradoxical: the same people who would have been happily shot at the revolution's beginning were not allowed to die a few years later, even if they went on a hunger strike...
...Valladares and his friends had to endure the same set of sufferings as three generations of Russians...
...it is rather a testimony, an indictment, a history of the Cuban "revolution" viewed from its dungeons...
...And how is a socialist revolution seen more clearly than from its "sewage system...
...What is the point in being starved and beaten just for the refusal to be dressed in a blue uniform instead of a green...
...Detail takes precedence over emotion...
...But eventually it comes to mind that this is not a book in any usual sense...
...We grew harder and harder, convinced that we were a symbol of resistance for the entire country...
...Mr...
...It is an indictment of Monsignor Cesar Zacchi, the Vatican's ambassador to Cuba, and of Pierr Schorl, secretary of the Swedish Social Democratic party, of all the advocates of "quiet diplomacy" and the architects of the silence that surrounds the crimes of Communism—in the words of Valladares, the "silence of complicity...
...Even many years later, numerous sympathizers and apologists for Fidel would still blame American "overreaction" for "pushing him into Soviet hands'^—a myth which can hardly be explained by a simple naivete...
...A large number of Castro's prisoners are his former comrades-inarms who "deviated" from his course at one or another turning point, while their cell-mates could be anybody from former Batista pilots to members of the current intellectual opposition...
...Finally the door swung open and the chief of police himself entered the room...
...T he confusion created by the hasty pace of Cuban history is duly reflected in the composition of the prison population...
...Their object was to force us, by means of terror and torture, into the Political Rehabilitation Program...
...different stages of "class struggle" and purges, as well as different periods of popular resistance, almost coincided...
...What might be interesting for a historian, however, is usually quite painful for contemporaries...
...He is the author of To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter...
...A group of us "borrowed" a sheet from our hotel, scribbled a slogan on it, and after smuggling it into the conference under someone's clothes, unfurled it in front of the ministers and the television cameras as Adriana Guillen, a spokesman for the Miskitos, presented their case...
...A sense of enormous responsibility for your nation becomes much stronger than a craving for your personal life...
...But dictators and conquerors do see the point...
...I am Armando Valladares...
...At La Cabaiia, executions were performed by young conscripts for five pesos and three days leave apiece...
...Indeed they were...
...Valladares spoke quietly, but there was so much dignity and force in his voice, so much implacable will in his words, that the chief merely looked at Vladimir Bukovsky left the Soviet Union in 1976 after twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and psychiatric "hospitals...
...beatings so brutal that your friends are often left bleeding, mutilated, or murdered...
...His first collection of poetry, From My Wheelchair, increased the public pressure from abroad that finally forced Castro to release him...
...This was the kind of treatment meted out routinely to Valladares and his colleagues...
...And I was very naive," he writes...
...To endure the regular beatings, the hunger, the humiliation and psychological "experimentation" to which a revolution subjects its unrepentant enemies, you must learn to be estranged, to watch yourself from a distance...
...The real turning point in Armando's spiritual development came in La Cabana, during the nightly executions: When I heard the discharges of the rifles, I would be seized with horror, and I embraced Christ in desperation...
...Some were forced to pull weeds with their teeth and to eat dirt, others were beaten to death or killed with bayonets, or submerged in ditches filled with human excrement...
...This naivete, we should add, was shared at the time by the most sophisticated political observers...
...that would have been too generous a gesture to have hoped for from those sadists...
...Thanks to them, the names of La Cabafia and Boniato, Isla de Pifios and Combinado del Este are not known to the world, as Auschwitz and Bitburg are...
...Why hasn't the Justice Department gone after him...
...How then do you describe the regular beatings with truncheons, chains, and bayonets...
...But while Castro and his admirers were vehemently denying any connection between the new Cuban regime and Communist ideology, thousands had already been thrown into jails for criticizing Marxism...
...Those cries of the executed patriots—i'Long live Christ the King...
...At Bonita prison, there were the "drawer cells" and "biological experiments," the latter overseen by Soviet, Czech, and East German "doctors...
...Fernando Arrabal, the Spanish playwright, suggested that we hold a small peaceful demonstration at the financial conference in hopes of attracting the media's attention, if only briefly, to the Indians' plight...
...For all its dispassionate detail, Against All Hope is not just a catalogue of horrors and tortures...
...Smuggled out of prison on tiny scraps of paper, his words continued the struggle, even though he himself could no longer walk...
...Castro would do that only some months later...
...As long as there is a symbol, the nation is not conquered...
...He served to give my life, and my death if it came to that, ethical meaning...
...Because of my situation, it seemed my life would necessarily be a life of resistance, but I would be sustained in it by a soul filled with love and hope...
...Down with Communism!'^—had awakened me to a new life as they echoed through the two-hundred-year-old moats of the fortress...
...It is, above all, a powerful testimony to the strength of the human spirit...
...But in step with the insane fury of the soldiers, a deep consciousness was growing inside us, an inflexible determination to resist, not to give in...
...In much confusion we were taken from the conference room to some sort of guardhouse, where the turmoil and hostility escalated as a series of police officials arrived, each one of higher rank than the last...
...The leader of the executioners was an American, Herman F. Marks, who "had a dog he took with him to the executions so the dog could lap up the dead men's blood...
...Marks, by the way, now reportedly lives in the United States...
...It seemed clear to us that the Sandinista policy toward them amounted to nothing less than genocide...
...I am much more familiar with such experiments than with the outright terror of the newly victorious revolution: They did not try to kill us quickly...
...At the time of his arrest in 1960, Valladares was a 23-year-old clerk at a postal savings bank in Havana...
...Human Rights Commission, which answered with silence all the appeals addressed to them by the Cuban poUtical prisoners...
...It never occurred to me that because I expressed my opinions, because I spoke out against Marxism, they would drag me off to jail...
...It is an indictment also of the U.N...
...They would take us to the very brink of death and keep us there, without letting us .cross it...
...No hatred or bitterness disturbs his dispassionate account because those who are not broken only pity their tormentors...
...Within a single generation Cuba advanced from "revolutionary justice" to "socialist legality," from the "liquidation of class enemies" to "political rehabilitation...
...It is an indictment of the world's complicity and indifference, an indictment of the \yestern sympathizers with the "charismatic revolutionary leader" Fidel Castro, who silenced the screams of the tortured...
...Those who have never lived through such an experience may see the struggle as senseless fanaticism, as a death wish, or as simple masochism...
...I have spent twenty-two years in Castro's jails...
...Confined to a wheelchair, asthmatic and starving, denied medical treatment unless he accepted political rehabilitation, Valladares suddenly discovered a new weapon: poetry...
...He was not politically involved, but he had "frequently spoken out against Communism as a political system because it went against my religious beliefs and some of my more idealistic notions of the world...
...Suddenly I heard Valladares's voice resounding in complete silence...
...him sheepishly, and I knew then that the incident was over...
...But perhaps this is as it should be in a country where the supreme leader combines in himself Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev...
...Although the local press paid some attention to the hearings, the world media ignored them, focusing instead on a conference of Latin American Ministers of Finance a few blocks away...
...To do that, they were slowly and inexorably destroying us...
...Both my life and my death would be dignified by my belief in Him...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
