NewsMax.com
Monday, May 8, 2000

So wrote Armando Valladares, former US ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission from 1986-1990 and author of "Against All Hope," the terrifying saga of his 22 years in a Cuban prison.

In the May 5 issue of the Wall Street Journal he wrote that If Elian is sent back to Cuba, he will be immediately brainwashed, a fact he says Castro himself has telegraphed by saying Elian will be "reprogrammed." Castro’s minions have even broadcast to the world the place where psychologists and psychiatrists will teach the boy "how to despise and hate anyone who is against communism – including his own mother, who gave her life to bring him to freedom," Valladares wrote, adding that in a few years in Elian’s mind his mother will "be nothing but a traitor to the Revolution."

As far as returning Elian to his father goes, Valladares says forget it. His father will have nothing to say about how Elian will be educated – that will be up to the Cuban government, which reserves to itself that authority over all Cuban children. All children, he wrote, are indoctrinated from the moment they start learning to read, being taught that they owe their loyalty to communism above all else. Elian’s father could find himself denounced by his own son should he, in a moment of weakness, criticize the communist government in Elian’s presence once the boy has been thoroughly indoctrinated.

The Cuba that Elian will face if sent back was chillingly described by Valladares in his book, which is dedicated "To the memory of my companions tortured and murdered in Fidel Castro's jails, and to the thousands of prisoners still suffering in them."

In recent issues of Washington Weekly and Wednesday on the Web, columnist Edward Zehr told Valladares’ story as related in the book, soon to be reissued.

"Valladares was a government functionary working at a postal savings bank who apparently made the mistake of being promoted too rapidly, incurring the enmity of envious colleagues. Come the revolution he was denounced and arrested by Castro's secret police. Because Communism conflicted with his religious beliefs, Valladares had made occasional comments that resulted in his being marked as an anti-Communist. He was tried and convicted as a counter-revolutionary and spent 22 years in Castro's prisons.

"Castro denied the existence of concentration camps in Cuba. In a chapter titled ‘A Nazi Prison in the Caribbean’ Valladares describes life at Boniato Prison, one of the worst camps on the island. On his first day there the author was introduced to "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. ... If all the other human rights violations had not occurred, what happened at Boniato would be enough in itself to condemn the Cuban regime as the most cruel and degrading ever known in the Americas.’

"What follows is a description of barbarity and sadism that makes Solzhenitsyn's Gulag sound almost like a pink tea. On the first day the cells were opened, one at a time, and the prisoners were beaten to a pulp. ‘They came in shouting and cursing. It was the same as always; they had to get all heated up to come in. They beat on the walls and the bars with the weapons they were carrying – rubber hose covered iron bars (so they wouldn't break the skin), thick clubs and woven electrical cables, chains wrapped around their hands, and bayonets. There was no justification, no pretext. They just opened the cells, one by one, and beat the prisoners inside.’

"The results were appalling. One prisoner ‘had his cheekbone fractured by Sergeant ‘Good Guy’; he spit out broken teeth. He'd been beaten so brutally his face looked like one huge black eye. Another had his head split open. ‘The wound was so large it took twenty stitches to close it.’ When the thugs were finished the prisoners were bandaged up and left in their cells to await the next beating, which came around nightfall. The prisoners were beaten twice a day for three days. One guard told a prisoner with a sneer, ‘I want to see them sew you up again.’

"The prisoners were fed diets ‘designed to bring on deficiency diseases and metabolic disorders.'" Soon cases of scurvy began to appear. Doctors were called in to examine the victims. ‘They came in later with other, foreign doctors, Russians or Czechs, I'm not sure, who touched the sick men, palpated them, scratched at their rashes, and wrote down data.’

"A lot of the guards did not understand the methods used at this camp. Among those who did understand ‘were the psychologists from the Department of Psychiatric Evaluation of the Political Police’ (perhaps some of the same psychologists and psychiatrists Castro has waiting for Elian in Cuba to "rehabilitate" him).

" ‘They were the ones directing this ambitious criminal experiment, and we were the guinea pigs.’ The object of the exercise was to make the prisoners accept political indoctrination. If the indoctrination didn't take the prisoner was killed eventually.

"The most horrifying chapter in the book is titled ‘Robertico.’ It is about a 12-year-old boy who picked up a pistol from the seat of a policeman's auto, which he had carelessly left unlocked, and began playing with it. ‘Like a cowboy or big-city cop, he'd aim at imaginary enemies or into the air to shoot a warning shot. Much to his surprise, the gun went off.’

"The cop, a commander in the Interior Ministry, heard the shot and rushed out to collar the boy who stood there befuddled and immobilized with shock. He was tried and sentenced to jail until he came of age. But prisoners are not separated into categories in Cuba. The boy was thrown into prison with ‘the worst kind of criminals.’ Valladares tells us that, ’Within a few days Robertico had been raped repeatedly. He had to be taken to the hospital with severe rents and hemorrhage. When he was released from the hospital, his file had been stamped with the word ‘homosexual.’

"This was very unfortunate for the boy, since homosexuals are severely repressed in Communist Cuba. According to Valladares, they are ‘persecuted, hunted down, harassed. The Revolution released all its fury on them. Men would be arrested in the street solely for the way they walked or for wearing tight pants or for powdering their faces.’"

This is the Cuba to which the Clinton administration wants to send Elian Gonzalez.