Interviews with Armando Valladares

When President Ronald Reagan appointed me as Ambassador to the UN Commission on Human Rights, he said: “I have an impossible mission for you. Try to convince the UN that there are human rights violations in Cuba.” After that report and after that denunciation which put Castro on trial, even many of the countries and the people who liked him, could not continue doing it. Because the report of the UN Commission on Human Rights had proved the treatment of the prisoners in Cuba was cruel, inhuman, degrading, that there was torture, summary executions, that there were no guarantees. And as the English Ambassador Steel once said, the entire Cuban society, the entire political, social and economical structure in Cuba, was a flagrant violation of each and every article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And Cuba stills stays there, on trial.

Armando Valladares, a poet, human rights advocate, and former diplomat, was a political prisoner in Castro’s Cuba for 22 years. After international pressure led to his release, he emigrated to the United States and served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission from 1988 to 1990.

Valladares was a Cuban Postal Bank employee who was arrested in 1960 when he refused to display a sign on his desk that endorsed Communism. Valladares, then 23 years old, was convicted of being a “counter-revolutionary” and spent 22 years in prison. He was adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience, and his prison memoir “Against All Hope” became an international bestseller and raised the profile of the campaign for his release. This campaign finally succeeded after then French President Francois Mitterand made a personal appeal to Fidel Castro.

During his service as ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Valladares succeeded in persuading the commission to adopt a resolution on the human rights situation in Cuba.