BOOKS
Torment in Cuba
Hugh Thomas
AGAINST ALL HOPE by Armando Valladares translated by Andrew Hanley
Hamish Hamilton, f12.95
Please turn over! The odds must be that this article, and the book which it is about, is not for you. This is for three reasons. First, a chronicle of sustained evil and cruelty in our time still going on, is almost impossible to grasp for most of our coun- trymen used as we are to constitutional development, as our insouciance towards Stalin's policies before the last war, and Hitler's during it, shows. Second, the book is about Latin America and is, therefore, likely to seem of no interest to most English people, who have no knowledge of that continent's geography or history. Third, the scene of the book is Cuba whose currently odious regime, now nearly 30 years old, has enjoyed a charmed life in the European media for the obvious reason that Castro has done what all Europeans have always been perversely tempted to and 'stood up' to the United States, and survived.
For the tiny minority who are not ex- cluded by the three categories above, Valladares's book is a bombshell. The suffering which he describes, the iniquities which he experienced or observed, the courage, faith (in God, as in himself) and Capacity for endurance which he showed and which he saw in others (often re- warded by murder) make this account one of the most extraordinary books which I have read. The comparison must be with the accounts of Nazi concentration camps. Although there are as yet no gas chambers in Cuba, there have been experiments of a criminal biological type designed to see how far an individual can survive starva- tion, beating, solitary confinement, and many various kinds of ill treatment. Valla- dares's account of working in a stone quarry is not dissimilar to, and no more humane than, the many accounts extant of life' in Mauthausen. Nor should one forget that the brutalities in Nazi Germany lasted at most 12 years and the gross cruelties in the Auschwitz extermination camps con- tinued for four years. Valladares's heroic period of imprisonment lasted for 22 years from 1960 to 1982.
Valladares's story is unhappily not uni- que. But the important thing about this book is that it is the first such account of Cuban prisons to appear in this country. One or two lesser memoirs have been published elsewhere, notably the account of three years in Cuban prisons by the French (ex-) communist Pierre Golendorf. Most others who have suffered in the Cuban GULAG, and who have come out, have understandably been apprehensive of the kind of warning given to Valladares when he did leave in the end by a police general: 'The Revolution has long arms, Valladares — don't forget that.' Others, like Huber Matos, have been too busy establishing a new position for themselves abroad to have committed themselves to the task of recovering their experiences in a literary form. Valladares, therefore, is a pioneer and this book, which has already had a great reception in the United States, Spain and France, will make him a great and deserved international reputation.
Valladares was not a counter-revolution- ary nor an agent of the CIA at the time of his arrest. Nor, despite the fraudulent efforts of the Cuban police to prove it, was he a Batistiano policeman. On the con- trary, he was a student aged 23 with a job in the Postal Savings Bank (some more biographical data might have been usefully supplied by the publisher). Valladares talked indiscriminately against the com- munist takeover of Castro's revolution and, in the nervy days before the Bay of Pigs, was arrested in his mother's flat at Havana at dawn, given a summary trial, condemned to 30 years and so began a long calvary through some of the island's, and the world's, worst prisons — the Isle of Pines (thought once to have inspired Stevenson for Treasure Island — Aie!), Boniato in Oriente (beside whose brutal guards it is indeed worth comparing Nazi ones), the `Combinado del Este', the new It's on the first past the machine-gun post basis.' prison built in the 1960s for the increasing number of prisoners and, above all, La Cabana, the old fortress overlooking Havana bay which may be known to those who have old prints of Lord Albermarle's expedition of 1762, and whose patios have been stained since 1961 with the blood of many thousands of opponents of the Cas- tro regime.
Valladares's prison experiences, told in a Matter-of-fact way, include a temporarily successful escape followed by a spell in a punishment cell, which make nonsense of the regime's claim that it does not practise torture; it also includes a description of how he and a number of other heroes refused to accept conditional release in return for accepting 'rehabilitation' and communism (the most prominent of these comrades was Pedro Boitel, a student leader who, in 1960, committed the impru- dence of beating the government candidate in a university election; was imprisoned and died, or was murdered, after a hunger strike in 1972. His mother was beaten by the police for trying to find his grave). Valladares also describes how he met, and was allowed to marry, Marta, a girl who came to visit a fellow prisoner, her father, and how the letters to her which he miraculously succeeded in smuggling out became the basis for a clandestine literary career which in turn led to his ultimate liberation, after months of physical rehabi- litation, as a result of a personal request of President Mitterand. The activities of French and Spanish periodicals in this campaign deserve commemoration.
Lists of the torturers named in this work should be widely publicised. (Amnesty International might consider a new depart- ment d la Simon Wiesenthal concerned to see that men like them do not escape in the unlikely event of the regime falling).
The chief memory which the reader will take away from this splendid book, howev- er, is not of horror because of the iniquity, but rather inspiration that so many people, from a nation of dancers, cigar-makers and sugar merchants, whom nobody before 1959 suspected of being able to produce great men, have shown over so long a time such an astonishing capacity for endurance and courage.
Valladares now lives in Spain with Mar- ta. He is a polite, courteous man still in his forties without a grey hair in his head. He speaks of his time in prison without effort or undue torment — almost as if it had been a disagreeable stay in hospital of a week or two rather than nearly a quarter of a century. His conduct seems to me to have been beyond compare.
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