Should a pastor give his life for the wolves?

For more than a decade I concluded my University of Texas journalism courses by reading to students an essay by a poet who sided with Fidel Castro in 1959 to overthrow a dictator. Armando Valladares criticized Castro when he became a worse dictator, and Castro sent him to prison for 22 years.

For Valladares, prison was “eight thousand days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement. … Eight thousand days of testing my religious convictions.” One of the regular drills among the guards was to stand on the steel mesh ceiling and dump on him buckets full of urine and excrement.

So Valladares had standing this week when he called Havana Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino “one of the largest and most indispensable advocates of the Communist regime.” Ortega, in a radio interview early this month, claimed, “In Cuba there are no political prisoners.” Valladares responded that Ortega’s long record of pro-Castro comments makes him “a pastor ready to give his life for the wolves and not for the flock entrusted to him.”

Valladares, who came to the United States when Castro finally released him, was U.S. ambassador to the Human Rights Commission of the UN under the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. He opposes President Barack Obama’s blown kiss to the Castro regime: “Perhaps never before in history have so many world leaders converged to save the wreck of a dictatorship.”

But Spanish is a much more mellifluous language than English, so try rolling the following over your tongue: “La Comisión Cubana de Derechos Humanos dijo que las declaraciones del Cardenal no tienen que ver con la realidad del país. ‘Ahora mismo, hay más de 50 presos políticos’ (Radio Martí, Jun. 08, 2015).” That means the Cuban human rights commission says there are more than 50 political prisoners—a great improvement over the thousands of past years, but should we ignore those 50-plus as we wine and dine their jailers?

Who or what can stand up against the “advertising Botox” Valladares says the Castro brothers and President Obama are applying? (“Botox publicitario que ahora el régimen aplica nuevamente por ocasión de las negociaciones con los Estados Unidos. …”) God can, and Valladares ended his message with a prayer that we not be indifferent to the helpless, orphaned, abandoned, abused and decimated flocks: “Que el buen Dios, al que en este momento recurro clamando por Justicia, ayude al indefenso, huérfano, desamparado, maltratado y diezmado rebaño cubano y remueva la Indiferencia mundial hacia ese drama inimaginable.”

Which brings me back to Valladares’ earlier writing, in which he described how Cuban jailers would read to him and other prisoners translations of New York Times stories praising Castro. “A political prisoner named Fernando came near my cell and told me in a disheartened voice that what hurt him the most about our torments, the beatings inflicted upon us, the hunger we suffered, was to think that our sacrifice was useless,” Valladares wrote. “Fernando was not broken by the pain but by the futility of the pain.”

Valladares wrote that López Toro killed himself: He was a “victim of general apathy, of that terrible soundless universe where so many worthy men and women continue to die.” President Obama, The New York Times, and Cardinal Ortega have evidently taken the side of the jailers. WORLD will continue to take the side of the prisoners.