NEW YORK--Critically-acclaimed Cuban artist and poet Armando Valladares received the Canterbury Medal this week, the highest honor bestowed by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
Valladares spent 22 years in a labor camp for not only refusing to place a sign on his desk in support of Fidel Castro but for also refusing to sign a document admitting he was wrong and the Revolution was right.
Valladares was sentenced to 30 years in prison without due process and brutally tortured for his stance. For 8 years he was left naked in solitary confinement and endured several hunger strikes.
"When I was 23 years old, I refused to do something that seemed at the time very small. I refused to say the words: 'I am with Fidel Castro," he said during his acceptance speech. "After years of torture and watching many of my cellmates die, I still refused to say those words."
Valladares accepted his award for standing up for religious freedom and told the audience that he believed God chose him to make the extraordinary move of defiance.
"I'm not an extraordinary man. In fact, I'm quite ordinary, but God chose me to be something quite extraordinary," Valladares said.
"Even though my body was in prison and it was being tortured my soul was free and it flourished," he continued.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the 78-year-old's New York Times best-seller, Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag.
While in prison he painted and wrote poetry using any material available to him such as medicine, burnt nylon and even his own blood.
The paintings along with his writings were smuggled out of prison and later out of Cuba by his wife Martha, who published them to critical acclaim.
Martha led an international campaign for his release. Amnesty International adopted him as a prison of conscience and in 1982 he was released.
During his speech Valladares called on religious liberty advocates to stand up for their beliefs at all times.
"Even when we have nothing, each person and only that person possesses the key to his or her own conscience, his or her own sacred castle," he said. "In this respect, each of us though we may not have an earthly castle or even a house, each of us is richer than a king or queen."
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