Reply #170: Tortured like the pitiful Armando Valladares, who also claimed he was

[Judi Lynn]

tortured dreadfully? He claimed guards pee'd on him, that he was paralyzed, etc. His friends were astonished to see him, expecting him to be delivered from the plane in a wheel chair, instead seeing him bounding toward them to give them big hugs. Here's just one article on the fella:

From:From: Karen Wald
Subject: Human Rights as Theatre --then and now
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 15:14:54 -0700

When the UN's Human Rights Commission was meeting a few months ago, and the White House and corporate press was screaming once again about "human rights abuses in Cuba" that they habitually ignore anyplace else in the world, I was desperately looking for this article I wrote in 1989, after attending the Human Rights Commission in Geneva that year and getting a taste of what that forum is really all about.
(snip)

(scroll to around 1/3rd down the page)

VALLADARES, ACTOR OF STAGE AND SCREEN

The center-piece of the US delegation's theatrical performance was Armando Valladares, a former political prisoner, poet and paralytic, -- or policeman, terrorist and imposter (depending on whose version you believe). In any case, an apt protegee of the film-actor president who appointed him.

Although ultimately of no consequence whatsoever to the final decision of the Commission, the question of Valladares --was he or wasn't he? (a policeman, a terrorist, a poet, paralyzed )-- dominated the debate between Cuba and the United States, and captured most of the media attention, for several weeks.

The US attempted to parade Valladares and a number of other rabidly anti-Castro Cuban exiles --many of them former prisoners -- before the Commission last year, too. But, according to the equally anti-Castro Miami press, they were given too little hearing by professional diplomats and international media, despite President Reagan's speeded-up granting of citizenship to Valladares to make him an official member of the delegation.
(snip)

Roa supplemented his remarks in the hall with a press conference repeating the charges that Valladares was a member of the pre- revolutionary Batista dictatorship's police force and a post- revolutionary terrorist band convicted for placing bombs in public centers.

He bolstered his arguments with an array of time-yellowed, worn documents and newspapers -- and a copy of a purloined US State Department letter from Secretary of State George Schultz to all US missions abroad, trying to "rehabilitate" the image of Armando Valladares.

Aside from this, the stolen US document probably did far less than the documents the Cuban government itself brought out to demonstrate that the current HRC ambassador had lied when he denied membership in the Batista police force and about his claimed paralysis while in jail. (Videos the Cubans played for the press at their Geneva Mission showed Valladares getting up and walking out of the room after being shown films taken secretly in his cell while he was doing exercises, at a time when he was still supposedly "paralyzed".)

The only thing perhaps new and noteworthy in the US document was the admission that part of the reason that Valladares book "Against All Hope" became an instant "best-seller" around the world was that it was distributed massively by the US Information Agency. (Presumably it was their advertising and publicity campaign that reached so many gullible reporters who, almost without exception, repeated the publicist's blurb about Valladares being no more than a soft-spoken, religious clerical worker whose only crime was to speak out against communism.)
(snip/...)

http://www.canadiannetworkoncuba.ca/Documents/KWald-theatre.shtml



He's on the left side of the photo.On the other side of
the blowhard is Jorge Mas Canosa, the man who was the "godfather"
of Miami, who actually believed the U.S. would grab Cuba back and
he would be made the Cuban President. (He was present during the
Bay of Pigs, but didn't get out of his boat.Returned to Miami, from
whence he ruled like a little monster, and kept Cuban "exiles" afraid
to cross him or his Cuban American National Foundation.)