. “Viva Cristo Rey! Long Live
Christ the King!”
The
Brother of Faith in Castro's Gulag
by
Armando Valladares
Introduction:
Shortly after the fall of the Batista
regime in [Cuba] 1959, a 23-year-old
office worker for the Ministry of
Communications of the Cuban
Revolutionary Government was arrested.
His crime was his outspoken opposition
to communism around the workplace. He
refused to display a plaque on his
desk saying, “If Fidel [Castro] is a
Communist, then put me on the list.
He’s got the right idea.” Armando
Valladares’s imprisonment would last
22 years.
In
Against All Hope, Cuban poet
Valladares has produced a painstaking
account of his sojourn in hell. His
tour of life in Cuban prisons reveals
man’s lowest capabilities...
Valladares and his fellow political
prisoners were routinely beaten,
tortured, and psychologically
manipulated. Every act of the guards
was intended to break the will of the
inmates and cause them to enter
“political rehabilitation” courses.
Valladares held his ground throughout
and paid for it dearly. His account is
a relentless tale of human
degradation: months spent in solitary
confinement, submersion in a ditch
filled with human excrement,
infrequent visits from family, and
overcrowded conditions.
Against
All Hope takes its title from
Romans 4:18, and its author’s faith in
Jesus Christ is gripping. When first
incarcerated, Valladares heard the
nightly cries of those before the
firing squads: “Viva Cristo Rey!”
(Long live Christ the King). This
witness led to the author’s
conversion.
“I not only understood
instantly, as though by a sudden
revelation, that Christ was indeed
there for me at the moments when I
prayed not to be killed, but
realized as well that he served to
give my life, and my death if it
came to that, ethical meaning.”
The
reader catches in Armando Valladares a
faith that works in the depths of
desperation. In contrast to the
oft-heard American gospel of success
and prosperity, the author exposes his
readers to a gospel of hope.
Valladares cries out to a God who
doesn’t “make everything okay” but who
is God nonetheless:
“I never asked him to get
me out of there; I didn’t think 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.”
The following excerpt
from Against All Hope
describes the "Brother of Faith"
who turned the prison of hell into
a community of living faith in
Jesus Christ.
The blows of the
machetes and bayonets on the prisoners'
backs sounded like low thunder. The file
began to break up, but the guards chased
the men down, striking out blindly. The
first prisoners made a superhuman effort
and almost ran to dodge the blows.
Suddenly, one prisoner, as the guards
rained blows on his back, raised his
arms and face to the sky and shouted,
"Forgive them, Lord, for they know not
what they do!" There was not a trace of
pain, not a tremble in his voice; it was
as though it were not his back the
machete was lashing, over and over
again, shredding his skin. The brilliant
eyes of the "Brother of the Faith"
seemed to bum; his arms open to the sky
seemed to draw down pardon for his
executioners. He was at that instant an
incredible, supernatural, marvelous man.
His hat fell off his head and the wind
ruffled his white hair. Very few men
knew his real name, but they knew that
he was an inexhaustible store of faith.
He managed somehow to transmit that
faith to his companions, even in the
hardest, most desperate circumstances.
"Faith, brother," he constantly
repeated, and he left a wake of
optimism, hope, and peace. All of us
called Gerardo the Brother of the Faith.
He was a Protestant minister and had
dedicated his life to spreading the word
of God. He was his own most moving
sermon. When he came to the prison of La
Cabana, thousands of prisoners were
squeezed into those galeras. There was
simply no space. Men slept on the floor,
in corners, under beds. And the fear of
death permeated our nights, for those
were the nights of the firing squads. We
never knew if we would ever again see
our friends who walked off to the
tribunals. Bullets killed so many Cubans
who stood up to the dictatorship; the
centuries-old moats shook with the brave
cries of "Down with Communism!" or "Viva
Cuba Libre!" But at those instants of
almost unbearable anguish and dread, the
Brother of the Faith would say that the
prisoner they had shot was a privileged
man, that God had called him to His
side.
Christian prisoner faces his executioners
in Castro's Gulag
When they opened the galeras he would go
through them, looking for sick men, and
whether the sick men wanted him to or
not, he would carry off their dirty
clothes. 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.
He would get us out of our cots to go to
the prayer meeting. "Get up, you lion
cub! The Lord is calling you!" It was
impossible to say no to the Brother of
the Faith. If he saw that someone was
pensive and downcast, he would say to
him, "I want to see you at the prayer
meeting this afternoon," and you had to
go. His sermons had a primitive beauty;
he himself had an extraordinary
magnetism. From a pulpit improvised from
old salt-codfish boxes covered with a
sheet behind a simple cross, the
thundering voice of the Brother of the
Faith would preach his daily sermons.
Then we would all sing hymns he wrote
out on cigarette packages and passed out
to those of us at the meeting. Many
times the garrison broke up those
minutes of prayer with blows and kicks,
but they never managed to intimidate
him. When they took him off to the
forced-labor fields of Isla de Pinos, he
organized Bible readings and choirs.
Having a Bible was a subversive act, but
he had, we never knew how, a little one
which he always carried with him.
If some exhausted or sick prisoner fell
behind in the furrows or hadn't piled up
the amount of rock he had been ordered
to break, the Brother of the Faith would
turn up. He was thin and wiry, with
incredible stamina for physical labor.
He would catch the other man up in his
work, save him from brutal beatings.
When one of the guards would walk up
behind him and hit him, the Brother of
the Faith would spring erect, look into
the guard's eyes, and say to him, "May
God pardon you."
There were more than a thousand
prisoners in that building. We all had
great admiration, great affection for
the Brother of the Faith. Whenever the
guards broke in to beat the stragglers
out to work, there, always encouraging
us, cheering us up, was the Brother of
the Faith. "Don't tempt the devil,
brothers," he would call out to the
tardy men. While we stood in the long
line for "breakfast"—the never-failing
sugar water—many times the Brother of
the Faith would tell Bible stories or
make us laugh with his original and
highly personal disquisitions on sin and
men's conduct. "Don't ever forget that I
lived in sin and knew temptations," he
would tell us. His constant labor was to
teach us not to hate; all his sermons
carried that message.
Excerpt from Against
All Hope: A Memoir of Life in
Castro's Gulag, Chapter
31, pages221-223, author (c) 2001
Armando Valladares, published by
Encounter Books, New York, London
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Communities
of Faith and Light
in the Darkest of Places
by Charles
Colson
To model the
kingdom of God in the world,
the church must not only be a
repentant community, committed
to truth, but also a holy
community... When we are
that holy community, we make
an impact on an unholy world,
no matter how desperate the
circumstances.
Thousands of such communities
of light exist around the
world in accountable
fellowships where the gospel
is faithfully proclaimed and
where members reach out in an
effort to bring God's mercy
and justice to those around
them... Only as the church
maintains its independence and
distinctiveness from [the
secular] culture, it is best
able to affect culture. When
the church serves as the
church, in firm allegiance to
the unseen kingdom of God, God
uses it in this world: first,
as a model of the values of
his kingdom, and second, as
his missionary to culture.
One example that clearly
illustrates this comes from
the Cuban Isla de Pinos, from
a prison so dark and remote
that most of the world never
even knew it existed. The huge
circular cellblocks were built
during the 1930s under
Batista's regime. When someone
asked the dictator why he had
built it so big, he replied,
“Ah, don't worry. Somebody
will come along who will
manage to fill it up.” That
somebody was Fidel Castro.
“Viva
Cristo Rey! Long live
Christ the King!”
One of the prisoners there was
a young anti-Communist named
Armando Valladares. Early in
his confinement, he often
heard prisoners – fellow
Christians – taken to the
firing squad. Such executions
always took place at night,
and the dark silence would be
broken by triumphant shouts:
“Viva Cristo Rey! Long live
Christ the King!” Then the
explosion of gunfire – and
silence again. Soon all
prisoners were gagged before
their executions. The killers
could not stand their
victorious defiance.
According to Valladares, the
most faithful member of that
tiny Christian community, made
up mostly of Catholics, was a
Protestant prisoner known
simply as the Brother of the
Faith. He constantly sang
hymns to God and shouted
encouragement to his brothers
to have faith, to follow
Christ to the end.
Then one night several
prisoners were forced from
their cells, and guards began
to beat them with sticks,
truncheons, bayonets, and
chains. “Suddenly,” writes
Valladares,” “as though to
protect them, there appeared a
skeletal figure with white
hair and flaming, bizarre
eyes, who opened his arms into
a cross, raised his head to
the invisible sky, and said,
‘Forgive them, Lord, for they
know not what they do.’ The
Brother of the Faith hardly
had time to finish his
sentence, because as soon as
he appeared [the lieutenant]
ordered the guards to step
back….he fired his AK
submachine gun. The burst of
fire climbed the Brother of
the Faith's chest, up to his
neck. His head was almost
severed, as though from the
blow of an ax. He died
instantly” (Against All Hope,
Ballantine Books, 1986, p.
421).
Fortified by the faithfulness
of this one man, as well as by
his own faith, in a way he
could not forget, Armando
Valladares survived gross
inhumanity, psychological
abuse, and torture for
twenty-two years. In 1983 he
was released and made his way
to the West and freedom. His
memoirs of those dark years,
Against All Hope, have exposed
to the world the hidden
horrors of Castro's prisons.
And therein lies the irony:
Though Castro controls the
Cuban press, suppresses the
visible church, conquers
academia, and rules a ruthless
government, he cannot rule the
spirits of those he has
enslaved. He cannot extinguish
the light of the soul set free
by God. And out of a flicker
of light in one dark prison
came the indictment of his
regime that shocked the world.
Out of
brokenness comes wholeness
and might
Is this not the way our Lord
works? Out of brokenness and
foolishness come wholeness and
might. Out of prison comes
power – real power-that defies
even the most brutal
repression. Out of tiny
monastic outposts come
education, moral endurance,
and artistic excellence that
can save a civilization. And
out of holy obedience today,
in communities of light, will
come what he wills, as we are
faithful.
Excerpt from Against
the Night: Living in the New
Dark Ages, Chapter
17, by
Charles Colson,
© 1989 by Fellowship
Communications. First
published in 1989 by Servant
Publications,
Ann
Arbor, Michigan USA. Republished
by Regal Books.
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photos
from google search
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