Armando Valladares: Against All Hope Valladares was imprisoned, tortured, and deprived of his humanity for 22 years and watched how fellow prisoners were indiscriminately murdered, raped, beaten to death among many other atrocities. Appointed by President Ronald Reagan as the UN Ambassador to the Human Rights Commission, I had the pleasure of meeting this Cuban man who wrote and spoke of Cubas own Abu Ghraib prison and torture network. long before The United States was accused of the same. Cubas own version of an Abu Ghraib prison and torture network still exists. His book, which I also read, was against Against All Hope and sold millions in both Spanish and English. A short description: Cuban poet, author, and former political prisoner Armando Valladares explores why the international community has supported the Castro regime for 51 years. He asks us to treat this regime in the same way that we treated the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and to take the same measures against the Cuban government that we took against apartheid in South Africa. He wonders, why were those measures taken against those countries but not against Cuba? Are the Cuban people second class citizens? Do they not deserve the same support and solidarity once given to Chileans and South Africans? We, the Cubans, Valladares explains, are as much human beings as they. Valladares was 21 years old when the Cuban Revolution took place. Like many Cubans, he felt great admiration for Fidel Castro, who spoke of justice and human dignity. He believed in Castro. In this talk Valladares explains how he discovered that Castro did nothing more than replace one dictatorship with another. One day at his job in Cubas postal bank, he refused to put an Im with Fidel sign on his desk. For this and this alone, Valladares was imprisoned, tortured, and deprived of his humanity for 22 years.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 23:18:51 +0000
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