Against All Hope Quotes

“My response to those who still try to justify Castro’s tyranny with the excuse that he has built schools and hospitals is this: Stalin, Hitler and Pinochet also built schools and hospitals, and like Castro, they also tortured and assassinated opponents. They built concentration and extermination camps and eradicated all liberties, committing the worst crimes against humanity.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“The food that afternoon was served in tins that had contained Russian beef. It was three spoonfuls of boiled macaroni and a piece of bread. That was February 11, 1970. That day saw the beginning of a plan for biological and psychological experimentation more inhuman, brutal, and merciless than anything the western world had known with the exception of the Nazis’ activities.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“I was utterly exhausted. The lack of sleep and the tension were seriously affecting me. I sought God then. My conversations with Him brought me a spiritual strength that gave me new energy. I never asked Him to get me out of there; I didn’t think that God should be used for that kind of request. I only asked that He allow me to resist, that He give me the faith and spiritual strength to bear up under these conditions without sickening with hatred. I only prayed for Him to accompany me. And His presence, which I felt, made my faith an indestructible shield.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“The men behind those iron palisades looked like skeletons; their faces were white and waxen from lack of sun. One of them was so emaciated that he seemed unreal. He didn’t speak, he didn’t wave or gesture, he was simply there, staring — he looked to me like a figure in a wax museum. However, not one of the men there could have spent more than two years and a few days in that jail. Just thinking about it sent a shiver of terror up my spine. Two years!”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“Those who hated the crimes of Pinochet closed their eyes when the same crimes were committed by Castro. The posture of many countries was governed by their hostility against the United States, and they excused Castro out of a reflexive anti-Americanism. (The enemy of my enemy is my friend.) These political games still take place today.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“He began talking about the Vietnam War and about the children who were being killed by the American forces there, and he told her that if she was a Christian, as she claimed to be, she ought to be indignant over the monstrous crimes the Yankees were committing. Martha told him that according to him and others like him the Americans were responsible for all the evil in the world, but people like him never talked about the way the Communists from North Vietnam were killing innocent people as they invaded South Vietnam. She said that it was never the men that caused the war who died — they sat comfortably behind their desks while the poor wretches they sent out to fight were dying.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“Because of my situation, it seemed my life would necessarily be a life of resistance, but I would be sustained in it by a soul filled with love and hope.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“Those cries of the executed patriots — “Long live Christ the King! Down with Communism!” — awakened me to a new life as they echoed through the two-hundred-year-old moats of the fortress. The cries became such a potent and stirring symbol that by 1963 the men condemned to death were gagged before being carried down to be shot. The jailers feared those shouts. They could not afford to allow even that last courageous cry from those about to die. That rebellious, defiant gesture at the supreme moment, that show of bravery and integrity by those who were about to die, could easily become a bad example for the soldiers. It might even make them think about what they were doing.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“Unbelievably, while many non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International and America’s Watch have denounced the human rights situation in Cuba, there has been a continuing love affair on the part of the media and many intellectuals with Fidel Castro.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“Exactly the same thing happened with the International Red Cross. Talking to it about violations of human rights in Cuba was like talking to a post; it refused to listen. Cuban political prisoners simply did not exist. Why get upset about them, then? Years later, the Red Cross came to believe what it had been told. The United Nations as a whole and its individual nations know about the horrors of the Cuban jails, but they don’t dare condemn Cuba in their annual assemblies.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“example. Every effort to get the Commission on Human Rights of the United Nations even to consider our denunciations was fruitless. We sent that organization detailed information about the tortures, the murders, the plans to blow us up with the explosives installed in the Circulars, but it did nothing. The prestigious Commission on Human Rights had deaf ears and blind eyes for what was happening in the Cuban political prisons.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“He heard ideas the mention of which — the thought of which — was prohibited in the society he represented. He often brought the newspaper Granma with him. It was the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba. And he would ask us to give him our reaction to things it printed. We would show him the doctrinaire objectives of the newspaper and the fact that the news was not really informative.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“Suddenly, one prisoner, as the guards rained blows on his back, raised his arms and face to the sky and shouted, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do!” There was not a trace of pain, not a tremble in his voice; it was as though it were not his back the machete was lashing, over and over again, shredding his skin. The brilliant eyes of the “Brother of the Faith” seemed to burn; his arms open to the sky seemed to draw down pardon for his executioners. He was at that instant an incredible, supernatural, marvelous man.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“The guards were making a butcher shop out of the stairways. There was a hail of blows with chains, bayonets, and truncheons. They were breaking heads and arms.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“All it took for the officers in charge of the Circulars to call out the guards was for a few prisoners to hold back on the floors. That was when the beatings started. The guards would rush in armed with bayonets, truncheons, and chains, and anyone they caught on the floors would be beaten senseless. These beatings by the garrison began after Captain Morejón said he’d give a gold medal to the man who could stand up for one year to the forced-labor plan and still not get down on his knees and beg to join the Political Rehabilitation Program.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“Monsignor Pérez Serantes, the man Castro had asked for help when the assault on the Moncada barracks failed in July 1953. Castro sought the monsignor’s protection and intercession with Batista to obtain certain guarantees if he voluntarily turned himself in to the authorities. (In the assault on the Moncada barracks, a group of Castro’s troops burst into the military hospital where wounded and sick soldiers were convalescing; several defenseless sick men were stabbed in the back as they lay in their beds. Some of them had just undergone surgery and were still under anesthesia.)”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“And in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs failure, not only our psychological state, but living conditions generally in the prison became much more severe. Even food was much scarcer. At that time, they would bring in vats full of greasy water with some vegetables floating in it — potatoes, pumpkins, yams — frequently dirty and rotten, at that. We found out from men working in the kitchen, who belonged to Circular 4, that one hundred pounds of foodstuffs per day were allocated for the six thousand prisoners on Isla de Pinos — that worked out to less than a pound for every fifty prisoners. And that was the extent of our food. The bread had not a drop of fat or lard in it, just salt, and not always that. Its texture was so rubbery that you could stretch it out to more than a third longer without breaking it.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“Around that time, there was tremendous optimism about the possibility of the fall of the regime. Only a few weeks before, the United States had broken off relations with Cuba, and President Eisenhower had stated that “the Communist penetration into Cuba is real, and it constitutes a grave threat to the Western world.” At that time many Cubans believed that a Marxist regime would not be tolerated in the Americas;”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“When they took him out and led him toward the moat, he passed in front of the portraits of Fidel and Raúl Castro. He paused a moment and then exclaimed, “And to think that because of those two wretches there are about to be five orphans!” Angrily, he turned toward Lieutenant Manolito, head of the prison, and said to him, “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“Guilty and innocent alike fell before the firing squads. In the mountains when government troops captured some of the alzados, the alzados would be shot down where they were captured, and doctors of forensic medicine would cut open their abdomens to try to find the rest of the guerrilla groups by seeing what the contents of the dead men’s stomachs were and determining where such food might be found.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“The mass execution was ordered by Raúl Castro and attended by him personally. Nor was it an isolated instance; other officers in Castro’s guerrilla forces shot ex-soldiers en masse without a trial, without any charges of any kind lodged against them, simply as an act of reprisal against the defeated army.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“On January 12, on a firing range located in a small valley called San Juan, at the end of the island in the province of Oriente, hundreds of soldiers from the defeated army of Batista had been lined up in a trench knee-deep and more than fifty yards long. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were machine-gunned there where they stood. Then with bulldozers the trenches were turned into mass graves. There had been no trial of any kind for those men.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“There was not one witness to accuse me, there was no one to identify me, there was not a single piece of evidence against me. I was found guilty, simply out of the mistaken “conviction” held by the Political Police. And sadly, my case was no exception.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“On January 12, on a firing range located in a small valley called San Juan, at the end of the island in the province of Oriente, hundreds of soldiers from the defeated army of Batista had been lined up in a trench knee-deep and more than fifty yards long. Their hands were tied behind their backs, and they were machine-gunned there where they stood. Then with bulldozers the trenches were turned into mass graves. There had been no trial of any kind for those men. Many of them were hardly more than boys, who had joined the army because money and food were scarce at home. The mass execution was ordered by Raúl Castro and attended by him personally. Nor was it an isolated instance; other officers in Castro’s guerrilla forces shot ex-soldiers en masse without a trial, without any charges of any kind lodged against them, simply as an act of reprisal against the defeated army.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“The machinery of the Revolution was not to be halted, and like Saturn it devoured its own children.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“It was like a murder trial in which the district attorney, asked who has been killed, says he doesn’t know; and asked about the corpse, says there is no corpse. Imagine killing a figment of someone’s imagination.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“It’s true — we have no proof, or rather no concrete proof, against you. But we do have the conviction that you are a potential enemy of the Revolution. For us, that is enough.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“The oldest dictatorship in the world exists in Cuba, and left wing dictatorships, like those of the right, have repugnant disdain for human rights. My response to those who still try to justify Castro’s tyranny with the excuse that he has built schools and hospitals is this: Stalin, Hitler and Pinochet also built schools and hospitals, and like Castro, they also tortured and assassinated opponents. They built concentration and extermination camps and eradicated all liberties, committing the worst crimes against humanity.”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

“I have become convinced that hatred towards the U.S. has been a chief reason for Castro’s longevity in power”
― Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag