Talk:Armando Valladares
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Wow, just wow, never seen so much PoV in my life.
Can someone who actually knows something about the subject work on this page, rather than this heroic piece of tripe that was made by some useful idiot of the anti-Cuba lobby of Miami? Eyeflash 17:44, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
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[edit] Short Bio
Born in Cuba. Member of the repressive forces of the Fulgencio Batista tyranny.
Detained and sanctioned for terrorists actions against cinemas and other social facilities. He was a member of various counterrevolutionary organizations.
He passed himself off as an invalid poet so as to receive help from organizations and people outside the country, who requested his release on humanitarian grounds. Ultimately he traveled to the U.S. after his farce was made public.
He was used by the U.S. government, acting in concert with the Miami mafia, in provocative actions against the Cuban Revolution during sessions of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Retrieved from "http://www.terrorfileonline.org/en/index.php/Armando_Valladares_Perez" --141.3.160.153 15:57, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Arguments against page
The United States’ attempt to demonize Cuba by labeling it a rights violator at the HRC has a long history, beginning in 1988, when Ronald Reagan was president and former CIA director George Bush was Vice President. But their efforts were halted that year by India, which successfully proposed tabling both the US’ resolution against Cuba and the Cuban resolution condemning the United States’ multiple and far more devastating human rights violations.
The Reagan-Bush administration came back the next year with a vengeance. It appointed Armando Valladares as US ambassador to the HRC, and sent both Reagan’s daughter Maureen and retired General Vernon Walters, then US ambassador to the UN, to carry the message that everyone better vote for the US resolution – or else.
Armando Valladares – the only national representative at the hearings who was unable to speak the language of the country he represented – had been freed a few years earlier from a Cuban prison, where he’d languished after being tried and convicted of participating in a counterrevolutionary gang that carried out terrorist bombings in the early years of the revolution. After a long campaign to free the former Batista-era policeman convinced many people around the world that the man was a “poet” who had been “paralyzed from the waist down” as a result of “mistreatment in Cuban jails”, Cuba acceded to the wishes of then-French President Francois Mitterand, and sent the hale-and-hearty Valladares to France. There he embarrassed his supporters waiting at the airport with a wheelchair by bounding off the airplane on his own two very-able feet.
Needless to say he never wrote another poem after he was freed. But an apparently ghost-written book distributed by the US Information Service, alleging years of torture and abuse in Cuban prisons, circles the globe. So Armando Valladares was a feature attraction when he appeared in Geneva at the Human Rights Commission hearings.
Whatever good impression his written tales of woe had won him dissipated quickly by the ex-policeman’s lack of diplomatic finesse. His heavy-handedness in ordering other countries – even the Western allies of the US – to vote as his newly-adopted government wished produced more than a few ruffled feelings. Valladares stated specifically at a meeting of the “Western bloc” of HRC nations that a vote against the resolution condemning Cuba would be considered a “vote against the United States”, one that would personally offend President Reagan. And in case anyone missed the point, he reminded them what had happened to India “after last year’s ploy”. (The US pulled back on massive purchases and credits to that nation, an economic reprisal India could ill afford.)
When the ex-cops diplomatic skills seemed sadly inadequate (many multilingual diplomats laughed at the fact that Valladares needed a translator to consult with his own delegation, and some Western diplomats were overheard complaining that he was treating them like “banana republics” by ordering them around rather than cajoling and using polite euphemisms), the US sent in the “big guns” in the person of Vernon Walters.
[edit] Ricardo Alarcón
As President of the Cuban National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcón, asked wryly,
Who transformed the terrorist and Batista henchman Armando Valladares into a poet? Who invented the lie that he was paralyzed? Who begged pardon from the Parisian authorities who awaited the athletic figure with a wheelchair? Has anyone explained to avid readers awaiting the first poem from the one US media claimed was an inspired and prolific bard?
[edit] Armando Valladares
Armando Valladares, a cop from Batista’s dictatorship, detained – that is the press of the time – for placing in public places bombs packed in cigarette boxes; a member of a terrorist cell in which Carlos Alberto Montaner also participated. They were convicted and for that reason Armando Valladares went to prison in Cuba. However, see how this started to be portrayed in the press: “A handicapped poet jailed in Cuba;” “Armando Valladares’ release demanded;” “Freedom for Valladares;” “Jailed in his wheelchair;” “A poet that languishes in Cuban prisons;” “From my wheelchair,” the book of poems by Armando Valladares, third edition; “The heart with which I live.” Look, the illustration from an important international newspaper: “An invalid poet.”
[edit] Human Rights Watch
Although the U.N. Human Rights Commission is an exceedingly political body, the political mix that led to an effective suspension of scrutiny of Cuban rights practices was in at least two respects a product of the continuing ideological strains in U.S. human rights policy toward Cuba. First, because the Commission's initial decision to review human rights in Cuba was due in large part to exaggerated U.S. charges of ongoing political executions, disappearances and torture, it became difficult to sustain that scrutiny when the U.N. delegation to Cuba found no evidence to support those allegations....
Second, U.S. credibility before the Commission was hurt by the perception that the administration's single-minded focus on Cuba was to the exclusion of comparable violators who happened to be U.S. friends. That perception was only reinforced by the Bush administration's decision to retain Ambassador Armando Valladares as the U.S. representative to the Commission. A former long-term political prisoner in exile, Valladares's understandable deep, personal antipathy for the Castro dictatorship appears to have left him with little interest in pursuing other violators, particularly of the non-Communist sort.
Accused of such selective attention during a September 20 [1989] hearing before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, Ambassador Valladares pointed to his work against rights violations in Afghanistan, Romania and South Africa to show that he had interests outside Cuba. But none of the three demonstrated an even-handed commitment to human rights -- Afghanistan and Romania because, like Cuba, they were Communist states, and South Africa because condemnation would be routine regardless of the U.S. position. Notably, Valladares made no mention of abusive governments where a strong U.S. stance against abuses would have made a difference before the Commission -- such U.S. friends as Iraq and Guatemala.
