Armando found sustained sleep impossible since Castro’s prison guards continually jabbed him awake with a long pole.1 His cell had a chain-link ceiling for easy access, and his tormenters also used it to shower him with buckets of human excrement.2 His first prison (La Cabaña, across the bay from Havana, where he was sent in 1960) was bad enough; the warden called it his “private hunting preserve” and let his dog lap up the blood after firing squad executions.3 But things got worse when Armando was shipped, along with 6,000 other prisoners, to the Isle of Pines, off the southwest coast of Cuba. There, in addition to beatings, they suffered from such malnutrition that pellagra4 and edema5 were common.6 Yet it was in this hellish prison system, in which he suffered for 22 years, that Armando found Christ.

When Castro’s forces fought to oust Cuba’s corrupt Batista regime, the revolutionary leader claimed indifference and even hostility to Communism, but as soon as he took power in 1959, all that changed. Then those, including Armando, who objected to the new Marxist program were declared “counter-revolutionary” enemies of the state. Many were executed; many more were cast into prison, where they stayed for decades if they managed to survive.

These prisoners faced powerful evil, but the witness of their Christian inmates was more powerful. Many a prisoner cried “Viva Cristo Rey!” (“Long live Christ the King!”) at the moment of execution, and this so impressed Armando that he turned to the Lord.7 Then he found nurture as a young Christian from the example and words of a Protestant minister named Gerardo. The prison population simply called him the “Brother of Faith.”8

When a prisoner working in the mango field or stone quarry fell behind, Gerardo would help him catch up and so avoid a beating. When the guards hit Gerardo instead, he would stand tall, look them in the eyes, and say, “May God pardon you.” Once back in confinement, he would search out the sick too feeble to care for themselves. “And you would see him down there in the prison yard, with a piece of burlap bag or plastic tied around his waist like an apron, standing over mountains of dirty clothes, bent over the washbasins with sweat pouring off him.”9

Gerardo would rouse the men for prayer meetings—“Get up, you lion cub! The Lord is calling you!”10 He preached daily “[f]rom a pulpit improvised from old salt-codfish boxes covered with a sheet, behind a simple cross.”11 His congregation sang hymns, using words he had copied onto cigarette packages. He held Bible readings and organized choirs. “His constant labor was to teach us not to hate; all his sermons carried that message . . .”12

The title of Armando Valladares’ prison memoir, Against All Hope, is taken from Romans 4:18, where Paul spoke of the sustaining faith of Abraham, “Who against hope believed in hope . . .” Valladares found such hope in Christ, and in the book’s closing words, he honors the memory of Gerardo, the Brother of Faith, who helped show him the way in the worst of circumstances—“the skeletal figure of a man wasted by hunger, with white hair, blazing blue eyes, and a heart overflowing with love, raising his arms to the invisible heaven and pleading for mercy for his executioners. ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.’”13
 
Footnotes:
 
1  It was commonly called a “Ho Chi Minh” pole. This form of torment was adopted from North Vietnamese prison camps.
 
2  Armando Valladares, Against All Hope: The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares, trans. by Andrew Hurley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 136-38.
 
3  Ibid., 18.
 
4  A vitamin deficiency disease due to a lack of niacin and protein. The symptoms include hypersensitivity to sunlight, insomnia, confusion, and aggression.
 
5  Swelling due to the accumulation of fluid, a symptom of poor circulation.
 
6  Ibid., 296-297.
 
7  Ibid., 16.
 
8  Ibid., 200.
 
9  Ibid.
 
10  Ibid.
 
11  Ibid., 296-297.
 
12  Ibid., 201.
 
13  Ibid., 380.
 
article adopted from Karios Journal

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located at 4800 W. Pulaski Hwy., Perryville, MD