Armando Valladares was 23 years old and worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Communications when, in late 1960, he refused to sign a poster requesting adherence to Fidel Castro as a communist. That refusal cost him 22 years of political imprisonment in Cuban jails, as he recounted in a interview given to CiberCuba.
Valladares recalls that in the late 1960s, the regime placed posters in government offices for officials to express their support for Castro. When one was placed on his desk, he responded clearly: "If he is a communist, no."
"That labeled me as an enemy of the regime. A month later, I woke up with a machine gun at my head, pressing my head against the pillow, and I was accused of ideological diversionism. That was it; no one charged me, they didn't use exclusive weapons, nothing," he recounted.
The irony of the historical moment does not escape Valladares himself: Castro still declared himself anti-communist and had publicly stated that communism was "the scientific slavery of man." Soon after, he would proclaim himself a Marxist-Leninist.
Initially sentenced to 30 years, his sentence was increased to 40 following an escape attempt from the Isla de Pinos prison, for which he received an additional 10 years.
The conditions you describe are of systematic cruelty. "I spent 22 years in prison, standing firm. In 22 years, I only had 13 visits. I spent seven years in a sealed cell with a steel plate on the door, another on the window, without light, living practically on my own waste," he declared.
Valladares belonged to the group known as the "plantados", political prisoners who refused to accept the regime's rehabilitation plan, which involved acknowledging the government's authority and participating in forced labor. This refusal came at a brutal cost.
"And I did not waver, just as many of my colleagues did not waver. All of that could have ended if we had accepted political rehabilitation. We did not accept it," he stated.
The physical damage was irreversible. "When they took us out of there, we couldn't walk straight because we had lost our sense of direction. We acted as if we were drunk," he recalled, remembering the moment he and his companions emerged from the bricked-up cells.
Valladares also spoke about how he met the person who would become his wife and the architect of his liberation: he found her in prison when she was visiting her father, Valladares' cellmate. She was just 14 years old at the time. "I was released due to an international campaign led by my wife," he said.
That campaign, supported by the French government of François Mitterrand, led to his release in 1982. Three years later, he published "Against All Hope," his testimony about the Cuban political prison, which received widespread international attention. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed him as the United States representative to the UN Human Rights Commission.
The situation of political prisoners in Cuba remains an open wound more than six decades later.
According to data documented by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the conditions experienced by Valladares—windowless cells, extreme isolation, inadequate nutrition—were a systematic practice of the regime against those who refused to capitulate.
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