Word: castros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Armando Valladares was a 23-year-old minor bureaucrat in Cuba's Ministry of Communications when the police arrested him in December 1960. The charge: "counterrevolutionary activity" because he had publicly criticized Fidel Castro's increasing dependence on the Soviet Union. Although he had supported Castro's 1959 overthrow of Dictator Fulgencio Batista, Valladares was, after a two-hour trial, sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment. During his confinement, Valladares began to record images and thoughts on the torn-off margins of Castro's official newspaper, Granma. Some of these fragments, which were smuggled...
...however, as a result of a new political strategy, Castro announced that he would lighten some prison sentences. I was taken to a civilian hospital, where I began to receive appropriate treatment. However, the publication of Castro's Prisoner in France resulted in the suspension of this treatment. I was sent back to prison, this time to Combinado del Este, where I remained until my release. In April 1981, the military transferred me to las celdas de castigo (punishment cells), which, at the time, housed 67 people who had been sentenced to death either for political reasons...
...pulleys and parallel bars. They then began to put me through intensive treatment. Supervision was very strict and the guards were handpicked. The authorities already had the intention of releasing me, and their objective was to remove all the aftereffects of the ill-treatment I had been subjected to. Castro had told several ambassadors and statesmen who had taken an interest in my plight that until I could walk I would not leave the country. The colonels in the political police often told me that the only prisoner who could not leave Cuba in a wheelchair was me. Other detainees...
...phony card that was supposed to show I was a member of Batista's political police and by trying to show that I had been a torturer. On my release I was easily able to show how worthless this proof was. If I had been a police torturer, Castro himself would have had me shot or imprisoned as soon as the revolutionaries seized power. Instead, I was promoted, and at the time of my arrest, I was a civil servant...
...Cuban government thought I would just lose myself in the Cuban community in Miami, that I would become involved with the conventional anti-Castro movements. Paradoxically, it was the colonels of the political police who were the biggest sponsors of the international opinion campaign initiated on my behalf. I recognize them as having been my best publicity agents and my best literary agents...