Paralyzed Cuban political prisoner headed to US

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/07/22/international/i165052D15.DTL&feed=rss.news_politics

Haven't I heard this story before?

From an earlier post here, last March:

Human Rights as Theatre --then and now
by Karen Lee Wald
June 4, 2003

~snip~
(Valladares, who left Cuban prison in October 1982 for France, from there to take up residence in Madrid, was granted US citizenship in January, 1987, although lacking the mandatory five year residency requirement. The justification for this flouting of US immigration regulations, according to the Miami Herald, "he is married to a US citizen and spends half his time in the US". Immigration lawyers can try to figure that one out.)

To make sure that the international community did not again snub his best spokesman against the Castro regime, this year Ronald Reagan appointed Valladares ambassador to the Human Rights Commission, thus guaranteeing that everyone would have to listen to him (whether or not they believed him).

This permitted and provoked more than your usual amount of theatre. On the one hand, Valladares could play his role of abused former political prisoner to the hilt. On Agenda Item 10, "Torture", the US representative addressed the Commission with what many smilingly described as his most accurate statement of the session:

"Mr. Chairman," he began "I am not a career diplomat, nor am I an expert on the technical aspects of this Commission." With that preface, he then excused himself from commenting on all of the items listed under that point on the agenda: torture in other parts of the world (that is, in countries other than those listed as separate agenda items because of the gravity of the human rights situation there). Instead, unlike all other delegation chiefs, who attempt to address broad issues, he limited himself to an entirely personal account (some would say fanciful) of his years in Cuban prisons.

Speaking in Spanish, Valladares expounded: "I remember when they had me in a punishment cell, naked, my leg fractured in several places --fractures that were never treated and eventually fused into a mass of deformed bones," the Ambassador claimed. "Through the wire mesh that covered the cell, the guards would pour over me buckets of urine and excrement that they had collected earlier."

The head of the Cuban delegation (which has only observer status in this commission), Deputy Foreign Minister Raul Roa Kouri, responded to US charges with a strong denial on the floor that the Cuban population would ever permit the return of pre-revolutionary repressive measures such as torture. He added that it would be virtually impossible for the government to be carrying out massive repressive measures without the public being aware of it -- and that lack of awareness would, in any case, negate the purpose of the repression. Numerous reporters and observers have confirmed that the bulk of the Cuban population backs the government's statement that torture is never used.

The Cuban delegation was not without its own sense of theatre, however. One Cuban delegate, unable to resist the temptation, ad libbed a low blow at Valladares' residence in Spain and inability to speak English. As she was about to read the Cuban resolution denouncing violation of rights of blacks, women, prisoners, linguistic minorities, the homeless and the poor in the United States, she introduced her remarks: "Mr. Chairman, I AM a career diplomat; I do live in and speak the language of the country I am representing, and I am speaking in the name of my people, so I have no need to make purely personal remarks."

Roa supplemented his remarks in the hall with a press conference repeating the charges that Valladares was a member of the pre- revolutionary Batista dictatorship's police force and a post- revolutionary terrorist band convicted for placing bombs in public centers.

He bolstered his arguments with an array of time-yellowed, worn documents and newspapers -- and a copy of a purloined US State Department letter from Secretary of State George Schultz to all US missions abroad, trying to "rehabilitate" the image of Armando Valladares.

This was more a diplomatic coup than anything else. The US was forced to admit that the document in Cuban hands was the real thing --embarrassing mostly because the Cubans had gotten hold of it, and because it showed a number of countries with whom the US maintains diplomatic relations the derogatory way in which the State Department refers to them in private.

Aside from this, the stolen US document probably did far less than the documents the Cuban government itself brought out to demonstrate that the current HRC ambassador had lied when he denied membership in the Batista police force and about his claimed paralysis while in jail. (Videos the Cubans played for the press at their Geneva Mission showed Valladares getting up and walking out of the room after being shown films taken secretly in his cell while he was doing exercises, at a time when he was still supposedly "paralyzed".)

The only thing perhaps new and noteworthy in the US document was the admission that part of the reason that Valladares book "Against All Hope" became an instant "best-seller" around the world was that it was distributed massively by the US Information Agency. (Presumably it was their advertising and publicity campaign that reached so many gullible reporters who, almost without exception, repeated the publicist's blurb about Valladares being no more than a soft-spoken, religious clerical worker whose only crime was to speak out against communism.)

Valladares was not without his supporters in Geneva. In addition to a militant (not to say aggressive) cheering section of Cuban- American reporters from the Miami area (the Miami Herald's English and Spanish papers had at one point a total of FIVE reporters covering the Geneva antics --an astonishing figure for a local newspaper), several reporters claiming to represent major wire services also acted as a Valladares fan club.

One, who said he was from Reuters, not only harassed Roa with hostile, disbelieving questions throughout the Cuban diplomat's press conference. He also proposed to other American journalists afterwards that they ask Valladares to "show his scars" as proof of his allegations of torture in Cuban prisons, "even if it means he has to strip in front of the assembly."

Days later, when the US delegate held a press conference, the Reuters reporter had a chance to put his plan into action. When other questions had been exhausted, he raised his hand and politely asked Mr. Valladares if he couldn't "show us your scars". Valladares obligingly leaned forward and let the reporter rub his head (you couldn't actually SEE the scars through Valladares shock of black hair, but Reuters let us know that he felt them).

More:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/klw-theatre.html

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Armando Valladares – the only national representative at the hearings who was unable to speak the language of the country he represented – had been freed a few years earlier from a Cuban prison, where he’d languished after being tried and convicted of participating in a counterrevolutionary gang that carried out terrorist bombings in the early years of the revolution. After a long campaign to free the former Batista-era policeman convinced many people around the world that the man was a “poet” who had been “paralyzed from the waist down” as a result of “mistreatment in Cuban jails”, Cuba acceded to the wishes of then-French President Francois Mitterand, and sent the hale-and-hearty Valladares to France. There he embarrassed his supporters waiting at the airport with a wheelchair by bounding off the airplane on his own two very-able feet.

Needless to say he never wrote another poem after he was freed. But an apparently ghost-written book distributed by the US Information Service, alleging years of torture and abuse in Cuban prisons, circles the globe. So Armando Valladares was a feature attraction when he appeared in Geneva at the Human Rights Commission hearings.

Whatever good impression his written tales of woe had won him dissipated quickly by the ex-policeman’s lack of diplomatic finesse. His heavy-handedness in ordering other countries – even the Western allies of the US – to vote as his newly-adopted government wished produced more than a few ruffled feelings. Valladares stated specifically at a meeting of the “Western bloc” of HRC nations that a vote against the resolution condemning Cuba would be considered a “vote against the United States”, one that would personally offend President Reagan. And in case anyone missed the point, he reminded them what had happened to India “after last year’s ploy”. (The US pulled back on massive purchases and credits to that nation, an economic reprisal India could ill afford.)

When the ex-cops diplomatic skills seemed sadly inadequate (many multilingual diplomats laughed at the fact that Valladares needed a translator to consult with his own delegation, and some Western diplomats were overheard complaining that he was treating them like “banana republics” by ordering them around rather than cajoling and using polite euphemisms), the US sent in the “big guns” in the person of Vernon Walters.

More:
http://members.allstream.net/~dchris/CubaFAQ207.html


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Now for something completely different! Here's the same guy, Armando Valladares, in a propaganda piece. It may surprise you seeing the difference in the telling of his story:

The Frontline : Survivors of Tyranny
Friday, October 08, 2004
Armando Valladares

In 1960, a 23-year-old postal bank inspector, Armando Valladares, was thrown into prison for refusing to compromise his Catholicism and political beliefs in favor of the increasingly repressive Castro regime in Cuba. Valladares received his 30-year sentence as a "counter revolutionary" because he would not place the placard "If Fidel is a communist, then put me on the list. He's got the right idea." on his desk. Valladares told Castro's agents, who had demanded that he conform, that he did not support Castro's communism.

For his honesty and courage Valladares was thrown into Cuba's notorious Isla de Pinos prison where he was subjected to the most inhumane conditions. In the 22 years he languished in prison, Valladares watched as his fellow prisoners were destroyed mentally, morally, or executed outright. Valladares counseled the Isla de Pinos inmates to stay true to their faith and not renounce God.

Valladares revealed his intense spiritual strength to resist communist indoctrination by saying, "For me that would've meant spiritual suicide. All the time I was in jail, I never gave up my freedom. My freedom is not the space where you can walk around. There are lots of people in Cuba who have space to walk, and they are not free. For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them."

Besides prayer, Valladares wrote poetry, which was smuggled out of his prison cell and published in Europe. Thanks to his poems Valladares became Cuba's most famous prisoner of conscious and came to the attention of French President Francois Mitterand, who secured Valladares' release in 1982 after serving 22 years of his sentence. Valladares published his collected poems as Against All Hope and campaigned ceaselessly to expose the plight of Castro's political prisoners.

Appointed in 1987 as a United States Representative to the United Nations' Human Rights Commission under President Ronald Reagan, Ambassador Armando Valladares successfully got the UN to investigate Castro's prison system and exposed its horrific conditions. In memory of another inmate, who had killed himself in despair, Valladares declared, "We must enter the cell of every Fernando Lopez del Toro in the world, embrace him in solidarity, and tell them to their faces, 'Do not take your life. There are men of goodwill who are standing by you. Your dignity as a human being will prevail.'"

More:
http://unix.dfn.org/ArmandoValladares.shtml

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Noam Chomsky, in his book, Media Control, (see excerpts) writes about one of the most famous Cuban "dissident" exiles and US media darlings, Armando Valladares and his equally famous prison "memoirs." He was appointed by US president, Ronald Reagan, as US representative to the UN Human Rights Commission and soon distinguished himself as an apologist for human rights violations on a massive scale perpetrated by US-backed regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador.

Chomsky contrasts Valladares' case with a true hero, Salvadoran, Herbert Anaya and his prison memoirs of atrocities. Far from becoming a media darling, it seems he and his memoirs conveniently dropped off the radar screen of US mainstream media--to the very limited extent they were ever allowed to appear. Chomsky writes:
In May 1986, the memoirs of the released Cuban prisoner, Armando Valladares, came out. They quickly became a media sensation. I'll give you a couple of quotes. The media described his revelations as "the definitive account of the vast system of torture and prison by which Castro punishes and obliterates political opposition." It was "an inspiring and unforgettable account" of the "bestial prisons," inhuman torture, record of state violence yet another of this century's mass murderers, who we learn, at last, from this book "has created a new despotism that has institutionalized torture as a mechanism of social control" in "the hell that was the Cuba that lived in. " That's the Washington Post and New York Times in repeated reviews. Castro was described as "a dictatorial goon." His atrocities were revealed in this book so conclusively that "only the most light-headed and cold-blooded Western intellectual will come to the tyrant's defense," said the Washington Post. Remember, this is the account of what happened to one man. Let's say it's all true. Let's raise no questions about what happened to the one man who says he was tortured. At a White House ceremony marking Human Rights Day, he was singled out by Ronald Reagan for his courage in enduring the horrors and sadism of this bloody Cuban tyrant. He was then appointed the U.S. representative at the U.N. Human Rights Commission, where he has been able to perform signal services defending the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments against charges that they conduct atrocities so massive that they make anything he suffered look pretty minor. That's the way things stand.

That was May 1986. It was interesting, and it tells you something about the manufacture of consent. The same month, the surviving members of the Human Rights Group of El Salvador - the leaders had been killed - were arrested and tortured, including Herbert Anaya, who was the director. They were sent to a prison - La Esperanza (hope) Prison. While they were in prison they continued their human rights work. They were lawyers, they continued taking affidavits. There were 432 prisoners in that prison. They got signed affidavits from 430 of them in which they described, under oath, the torture that they had received: electrical torture and other atrocities, including, in one case, torture by a North American U.S. major in uniform, who is described in some detail. This is an unusually explicit and comprehensive testimony, probably unique in its detail about what's going on in a torture chamber. This 160-page report of the prisoners' sworn testimony was sneaked out of prison, along with a videotape which was taken showing people testifying in prison about their torture. It was distributed by the Marin County Interfaith Task Force. The national press refused to cover it. The TV stations refused to run it. There was an article in the local Marin County newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, and I think that's all. No one else would touch it. This was a time when there was more than a few "light-headed and cold-blooded Western intellectuals" who were singing the praises of Jose Napoleon Duarte and of Ronald Reagan.

Anaya was not the subject of any tributes. He didn't get on Human Rights Day. He wasn't appointed to anything. He was released in a prisoner exchange and then assassinated, apparently by the U.S.-backed security forces.
More:
ttp://members.allstream.net/~dchris/CubaFAQ105.html

ARMANDO Valladares, the bizarre Cuban-American “dissident” whom Reagan appointed ambassador to the UN and who was recently involved – in his role as general secretary of the Human Rights Foundation – in an assassination attempt in Bolivia, has recently left this bogus NGO under the pretext of “devoting himself” to the Honduran “cause”.

The veteran “freedom fighter” has a good reason for using the Honduran coup regime smoke screen: he is to appear before a Spanish court for his involvement in a massive fraud, which could lead to his imprisonment or bankruptcy, or both.

The truth is that the multimillion-dollar fraud of which he is accused in Cantabria, Spain reveals his real personality as a conman.

This individual, who was a police officer during the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba, suddenly materialized in Spain at the end of 2007 in the guise of a “U.S. investor” heading up a Miami-based international financial corporation, with a proposal for the Cantabrian government for a multimillion dollar investment in a Film City project.

more http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs2606.html