His loud "exile" support group in Miami howled mightily over the Cuban government keeping a poor, innocent angel like him in prison, making him well known internationally. No one of them ever admits that was all a hoax, either.
Here's a quick grab from a search which discusses his "tragic condition:"
~snip~
For many years Armando Valladares was portrayed
in a campaign to free him, not as a terrorist, but
as a "poet" who had been "paralyzed by torture in
Castro's prisons" and therefore confined to a
wheelchair.
A poet, Valladares assuredly never was. Although
his "support committee" (not surprisingly made up
of the same people who were working round the
clock to oust Cuban President Fidel Castro)
gathered some poorly-written "poems" he scribbled
while in prison (how many lonely men in isolated
prisons cells the world over pen their thoughts
and longings in the form of poems, however
illiterate!), he never made an attempt to write
poetry before -- or since -- his imprisonment.
But that was the least inaccurate of the myths
construed around the man. For neither was he
"paralyzed" (except perhaps for a brief loss of
feelings in his limbs brought on by a hunger
strike he engaged in, and which disappeared once
he began eating again.)
After his release -- at the request of French
authorities -- that story quickly unraveled, as
the "paralyzed poet" emerged on his own two feet
from the airplane that brought him to Orly Airport
(similar to Chilean ex-dictator Pinochet
remarkably recovering his physical and mental
capacities as soon as London sent him back to
Chile). His embarrassed supporters, waiting at
the airport with a wheelchair, were left with egg
on their face as he went bounding down the runway,
obviously no worse for wear. No surprise, however,
to Cuban authorities, who TOLD French President
Francois Mitterand that the man was a faker --
they had secretly filmed him doing calisthenics in
his jail cell during the time that he was
pretending to be paralyzed.
That wasn't all they told Mitterand. A San
Francisco Examiner (Hearst Syndicate) columnist
who went to Cuba to check on Valladares'
background when the first version of his book was
published (and circulated around the US and the
world by the US Information Service) found
abundant evidence that the man had been, in fact,
a policeman under the Batista regime. Batista,
you may recall, was labeled by our State
Department as one of the bloodiest dictators in
Latin America (his only close competition being
Somoza in Nicaragua and Papa Doc in Haiti).
Although Valladares was still denying this at the
time, photo-id cards with his thumb print on them
were found in old records. As were old, yellowed
clippings from the early 60s describing the
terrorist bombings and later the arrest of the
group Valladares had expressed his "dissent" with.
More:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/peacecenter/message/2390?var=1
= new reply since forum marked as read
