An award for Armando Valladares

Cuban poet and artist Armando Valladares is scheduled to receive tonight in New York City The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’s Canterbury Medal, given annually to “a person who embodies and lives out an unfailing commitment to religious freedom, someone who has resolutely and publicly refused to render unto Caesar that which is God’s.”

Valladares spent 22 years in Fidel Castro’s prisons for refusing to put an “I am with Fidel” placard on his desk. This year is the 30th anniversary of Against All Hope, the courageous Cuban’s memoir. Last year in Miami I had the pleasure of interviewing Valladares, whose 79th birthday is on May 30, and WORLD gave him our first Daniel of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award.

Valladares recently wrote, “America, perhaps more than any other nation in the world, understands and defends the sanctity of the human mind and the beliefs that flourish and guide it. We are still a beacon to the men and women that languish in their jail cells for holding steadfast to their beliefs and for refusing to violate them despite intimidation in places where tyrannical thugs or ISIS zealots reign with terror.”

In publicizing tonight’s award, Becket Fund executive director Kristina Arriaga citedValladares’ statement that during his captivity every inch of his body was tortured and imprisoned but he was still a free man because no one could touch his faith: “He personifies courage and strength and has devoted his life to the defense of human rights around the world.”

Here an excerpt from our interview last year that we didn’t have room for in the print magazine:

When your jailers told you they did not require a public confession or statement, and they clearly just wanted to break your spirit, why did they care so much? One of the things they hated the most was the God I served. They wanted me to renounce God. And they didn’t want only to break my spirit. There were thousands like me, every one of which would have been able to write a book as dramatic as mine. Other guys were more tortured and more abused than I was, but not all of them had the ability perhaps to write.

The Castro regime released you only after an international campaign developed by your wife, Marta. She made me known all over the world to get me out of prison. In The Odyssey, Penelope waited 20 years for her husband’s release, but she was knitting at home. Marta waited 21, but she wasn’t knitting.

When they were torturing you, how did you keep from hating? I had a defensive attitude from the beginning. I said those people can do whatever they want to every single part of my body, but they cannot touch my soul or my heart. I was able to walk out of that cell not feeling hatred, but many of my prison friends were totally dead inside because of the hatred that was consuming them. It never consumed me.

When you look at American newspapers, magazines, journalists, do you see any who are doing a good job today of reporting the real situation in Cuba? Except for The Wall Street Journal, all of the other newspapers and magazines lie about the situation in Cuba. Just a few days ago in The Washington Post I saw an article full of lies. It was about a prison that once housed Fidel Castro and now it’s a library—but the writer ignored the 25 years that Castro’s political prisoners were there suffering in jail.