Perhaps the most compelling prison memoir since Solzhenitsyn's gulag Archipelago, Against All Hope is not only a graphic, painful account of the unspeakable and frequently unimaginable horrors of Castro's prisons, but also an inspiring portrait of a genuine hero. To read this memoir is to be moved to reflect upon the meaning of true heroism. We are forced to ask ourselves what sort of man could survive, "against all hope," nearly twenty-two years of imprisonment, beatings, starvation, sickness, and psychological torment?
Valladares, an employee of the Postal Savings Bank when he was arrested in 1961, neither wanted nor expected to be a hero. He did not knowingly court danger, although he had frequently spoken out against communism because it went against his Christianity: "It never occurred to me that because I expressed my opinions, because I spoke out against Marxism, they would drag me have to jail." At the time, Castro had not yet declared himself a Marxist.
The long years of beatings and severe deprivations that he subsequently suffered brought forth in him a mysterious strength of character. Without the experience of prison, Valladares would have undoubtedly lived quite an ordinary life. But suffering transformed him. The noble character depicted in the pages of this book stands as a standard against which civilized people everywhere can measure the quality of courage.
We spend most of our lives unaware of our true character. Only when we experience a profound moral crisis do we find out the sort of stuff we are really made of. Valladares' character was revealed to him, and to us through this book, by his terrible ordeal. He found a rare, nearly saintly spiritual serenity within himself that ennobled him while so many others perished or were corrupted by the system. Despite the prolonged unjust physical and psychological torment he suffered while entombed in Castro's prisons, he managed to emerge untainted with bitterness or hatred against his former oppressors.
What gave him the strength to survive when so many others submitted and cooperated with the authorities or went mad? The key certainly lies in the deep religious faith that sustained him during the long dark night of his imprisonment. His extraordinary power to withstand the afflictions of the flesh was due entirely to a strength derived from his unwavering beliefs. He clung tenaciously to certain convictions and ethical values, knowing that to compromise them would mean the disintegration of his humanity. Whenever he felt his will to resist the corrupt system weakening or experienced self-doubts, he would dig deep into the reserves of his spiritual strength by praying to God to show him the right path. "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."
What saved him from becoming an animal, although compelled to live like one, was his ability to invent "interior worlds which I would fill with the images that flooded my mind when I closed my eyes: light, air, inextinguishable suns, horizons that no barbed wire could ever bound, stars, flowers,
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