Armando Valladares

  b. 1937 | Cuban political dissident

At The Bottom

— 1960

Valladares watched as fellow prisoners were tortured; he listened to the defiant cries of condemned men.

It was the simplest of acts that landed Armando Valladares in the hands of the authorities:  As an employee of the Ministry of Communications, he had discussed his opposition to communism with his friends.  Citizens in a free society would have nothing to worry about due to such statements, but Valladares happened to be living in Cuba during the aftermath of Fidel Castro’s revolution.  A two-hour trial — which featured no actual witnesses or evidence against him — resulted in a swift conviction and 30-year sentence for “counter-revolutionary activities.”  A few days after his conviction, the young prisoner was transferred to the Isla de Pinos, which the revolutionaries had turned into “the Siberia of the Americas,” with conditions resembling those of Stalinist-era Soviet facilities. There, Valladares watched as fellow prisoners were tortured; he listened to the defiant cries of condemned men before volleys of rifle fire tore through their bodies. His companions were murdered and mutilated. In time, he would be tortured repeatedly as well. Prison officials placed more than 13 tons of dynamite around each building — an insurance plan of sorts that guaranteed that an attack on Cuba would, in the very least, fail to liberate its most “dangerous” political dissidents.