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 Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag by Armando Valladares |
Against
All Hope
is Armando Valladares' account of over twenty years in Fidel Castro's
tropical gulag. Arrested in 1960 for being philosophically and religiously
opposed to communism, Valladares was not released until 1982, by which
time he had become one of the world's most celebrated "prisoners
of conscience." Interned all those years at the infamous Isla de
Pinos prison (from whose windows he watched the failure of the Bay of
Pigs invasion), Valladares suffered endless days of violence, putrid food
and squalid living conditions, while listening to Castro's firing squads
eliminating "counter revolutionaries" in the courtyard below
his cell. Valladares survived by prayer and by writing poetry whose publication
in Europe brought his case to the attention of international figures such
as French President Francois Mitterand and to human rights organizations
whose constant pressure on the Castro regime finally led to his release.When
Against All Hope first appeared, it was immediately compared
to Darkness at Noon and other classic prison narratives about the resilience
of the human spirit in the face of totalitarianism. Now, with a new introduction
by the author, which tells of his life since prison and brings the story
of Cuban dissidence up to the case of Elian Gonzalez, Against All
Hope is more relevant than ever. Armando Valladares was a political prisoner in Castro's Cuba for twenty-two years. After international pressure led to his release, he came to the United States and served as Ambassador to the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations during the Reagan and Bush administrations. He spent many years in Madrid and now lives with his family in Miami. What Mr. Valladares gives us is a picture of the hell that was the Cuba he lived in, and the story of how one man's deep Christian faith enabled him to sustain the most evil treatment and never abandon hope, no matter how fruitless hope appeared." -- Ronald Radosh, The New York Times Book Review "Against All Hope is an extraordinary account of the cruelty that we should know enough to expect from dictatorships but that in the case of Fidel Castro has been more successfully concealed from outside observers...What sets it apart from other prison memoirs is not the suffering...but its record of all-out resistance. It could almost be entitled "The War Memoirs of Armando Valladares." —Los Angeles Times "Mr.
Valladares offers a record of dearly bought knowledge that no one can
afford to overlook." |
