Deliverance

French pressure frees a poet

The campaign began last November with a letter from French President Franc,ois Mitterrand to Cuban President Fidel Castro. It was followed up during trips to France by Cuban Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez and to Cuba by French Culture Minister Jack Lang. Finally the good news was made public in Havana last week by Regis Debray, the revolutionary theoretician who has advocated Castro-like takeovers throughout Latin America and who now serves as an adviser to Mitterrand. Debray announced that Armando Valladares, 45, a Cuban poet who has been in prison for 21 years, would be freed and flown to Paris. His release was a direct result of pressure from the French government, and is the first concrete result of Mitterrand's controversial policy of rapprochement with leftists in such Latin American countries as El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cuba.

Valladares was an opponent of the re gime of President Fulgencio Batista, which was overthrown by Castro's revolution in 1959. But two years later, Valladares was arrested for publishing criticism of Cuba's relapse into satellite status, having replaced close U.S. ties with allegiance to the Soviet Union. After a two-hour trial, Valladares was convicted of "counterrevolutionary activities" and of "threatening public security." Sentenced to 30 years in prison, he has been confined in jails like the notorious Boniato, where remoteness and appalling conditions have generated many prisoner uprisings. He was tortured physically and psychologically for his refusal to submit to political rehabilitation. A 14-day hunger strike in 1974 in protest against the stringent regulations for political prisoners left him partially paralyzed for several years. He was denied medical care and until 1980 the use of a wheelchair sent to him by Amnesty International.

Deprived of books and paper, Valla dares wrote on the torn-off margins of the official Castro newspaper Granma. The bits and pieces were smuggled out of prison in dirty laundry and out of Cuba in a toothpaste tube. Three volumes of his verse and letters have been published in the U.S. and Western Europe. A few years ago, in one of his smuggled missives he wrote: "I don't think I will leave this prison alive ... I know there are plans to kill me. Now they are waiting for my health to worsen so that [my death] would seem an accident." On his arrival in Paris at week's end, Valladares was quick to thank President Mitterrand for proving his prophecy wrong.

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