Interviews with Armando Valladares

The crime and barbarity are equally despicable whether they are committed by the right or the left. That is, the double standard is not honest. That is, to see the crimes only on one side and justify them when they are committed on the side we sympathize with is something absolutely immoral. That is why I think that the only way that we can have a strong position, the only moral strength that the person who denounces has, is to denounce the crimes both to the right and to the left. There is no difference at all. A crime is a crime, no matter who the person who commits it is. And a violation of human rights is never justifiable.

I think this double standard starts at the supposedly most prestigious organization that fights for human rights, which is the UN Commission on Human Rights. It is difficult, at least for me, to think of another organization that is as immoral as the UN Commission on Human Rights. Why do I say immoral? Because when you get there and denounce that human beings are being tortured and abused, the governments, before making a statement… which is what they should do, they should reject it and declare themselves against that abuse, but they do not do that.

Before making a statement, the governments first investigate the nature of the inmate or the tortured person and the nature of the torturer, and depending on the political sympathies, they denounce it or they keep quiet and justify those crimes. That double standard characterizes the UN Commission on Human Rights. Now, being called the Human Rights Council, the countries with the most violations of human rights in the world — Cuba, Iran, North Korea — are members of that Council, and we can expect nothing else but that double standard of condemning the crimes of those who think differently and justify the ones of a regime that they like for some reason.

That is what I mean by a double standard. And we have to fight against it, because the reason why there are so many violations of human rights in the world and the reason why thousands and thousands of people suffer violations and nobody says a word is precisely because of that double standard.

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.