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.

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

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.

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

There were nights when there would be ten or twelve executions. You would hear the bars of the man's cell door and someone coming to the bars to see his friend and cry out to him the last goodbye. There was no way to sleep in the galeras. That was when God began to become a constant companion of mine, and when death became a door into the true life, a step from the shadows into eternal light.

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

Hernández [Director of the prison at La Cabaña] declared that he was opposed to torture and that he felt that no prisoner should be mistreated. But for him, only beatings might be considered a violation of human rights, keeping us completely incommunicado, denying us any mail, visits, books, keeping us naked and underfed, making us sleep on the floor, and effecting psychological tortures on us were not violations.

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

"You are not political prisoners. You are counterrevolutionaries. In socialist countries there are no political prisoners, that's the first thing you must recognize." [Statement by a Lieutenant from the Political Police]

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

That last the caravan stopped at the entrance of Boniato Prison. When the door opened, I saw a great billboard saying: "CUBA – FIRST FREE TERRITORY IN AMERICA."

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

Cuba was, for most people in the outside world, a kind of earthly paradise, reached by the grace of the revolution. With their distorted news reports on Cuban reality, the world's press backed the tyrant Castro, and the governments of the capitalist nations of Europe, such as Sweden, offered him diplomatic support, trade, and generous free foreign aid.

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

Pierre Golendorf, a French Marxist intellectual... had come to Cuba and worked for the Cuban government. But Pierre had seen through the falseness of what he called the games of the Revolution and realized that the island was one big farm that Castro ran like a slave plantation.

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

And the government was lying, saying that no other political prisoners were included because those who remained in the prisons were terrorists.

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

"You know why, Valladares—We have to take drastic measures against you. You keep sending false reports of your treatment out to the foreign press, complaining all the time. We can't allow that, and you won't write anything here. That's why. And you were the one responsible for your situation." [Statement by Major Guido, of the Political Police]

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

He turned red. The lieutenant came to his aid; he spoke softly. "No, Valladares. We haven't created the situation. You have. You've forced us to take preventative measures. And you're lucky to be a prisoner in a Communist jail, where an inmate's physical integrity is respected. If this were a jail in one of the capitalist countries they have killed you already or would beat you."

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag

A communist always seems to prefer an angry, blurted, uncontrolled manner. The truth, spoken calmly to his face, always exasperates him.

— Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag