16 Quotes by Armando Valladares

Exactly the same thing happened with the International Red Cross. Talking to it about violations of human rights in Cuba was like talking to a post; it refused to listen. Cuban political prisoners simply did not exist. Why get upset about them, then? Years later, the Red Cross came to believe what it had been told. The United Nations as a whole and its individual nations know about the horrors of the Cuban jails, but they don’t dare condemn Cuba in their annual assemblies.

Around that time, there was tremendous optimism about the possibility of the fall of the regime. Only a few weeks before, the United States had broken off relations with Cuba, and President Eisenhower had stated that “the Communist penetration into Cuba is real, and it constitutes a grave threat to the Western world.” At that time many Cubans believed that a Marxist regime would not be tolerated in the Americas;.

The guards were making a butcher shop out of the stairways. There was a hail of blows with chains, bayonets, and truncheons. They were breaking heads and arms.

On January 12, on a firing range located in a small valley called San Juan, at the end of the island in the province of Oriente, hundreds of soldiers from the defeated army of Batista had been lined up in a trench knee-deep and more than fifty yards long. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were machine-gunned there where they stood. Then with bulldozers the trenches were turned into mass graves. There had been no trial of any kind for those men.

He heard ideas the mention of which – the thought of which – was prohibited in the society he represented. He often brought the newspaper Granma with him. It was the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba. And he would ask us to give him our reaction to things it printed. We would show him the doctrinaire objectives of the newspaper and the fact that the news was not really informative.

There was not one witness to accuse me, there was no one to identify me, there was not a single piece of evidence against me. I was found guilty, simply out of the mistaken “conviction” held by the Political Police. And sadly, my case was no exception.

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.