“Viva Cristo Rey!”

“Viva Cristo Rey!”

Hidden on a small island off the coast of Cuba is a prison so remote that the outside world didn’t know it existed. After the Communist takeover of Cuba in 1959, thousands of Fidel Castro’s enemies disappeared in the dark of night. Most were transported to this sinister place called Isla de Pinos—the Isle of the Pines. Among them was a twenty-three-year-old human rights activist, Armando Valladares. He had been sentenced to thirty years at hard labor. What was the crime that earned such a severe prison term? He refused to put a pro-Castro sign on his desk at work. He had been offered a lighter sentence if he would toe the Communist Party line, but he would not.

Valladares later wrote, “For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove I was a human being . . . 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheistic jailors were trying to instill in me with every bayonet thrust.”

Daily, he watched prisoners being dragged before firing squads. Many were pastors and priests. Just before they were shot, they shouted, “Viva Cristo Rey!”—“Long live Christ the King!” An explosion of gunfire would be followed by deathly quiet. Inmates shouting back from their cells would break the silence: “Viva Cristo Rey!” Eventually the condemned were gagged prior to their execution lest their triumph in the face of death inspire the rest of the prisoners.

Though most of the Christians were Catholics like Valladares, he remembers a Protestant prisoner called the Brother of the Faith. Though repeatedly beaten, he sang hymns at the top of his lungs and shouted to fellow Christians to follow Christ to the end—especially as they were being led to the place of execution.

Valladares writes about the night that prisoners were hauled from their cells to a courtyard where guards began to beat them with rubber hoses and chains. A skeletal figure with long white hair and blazing eyes opened his arms and cried out, “Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.” Before he could finish, a lieutenant took quick aim and killed the Brother of the Faith.

Armando Valladares never forgot that martyr or other Christians who were light and salt in the human decay of that prison. After years of suffering the grossest of inhumanities, he was released from the Isla de Pinos. Somehow he made it to the United States and freedom. You can read his story in his book Against All Hope. There is a wonderful irony in the title of his book. Hope is the one thing we can never lose, no matter how much is against it.

People can live about thirty days without food, five days without water, and five minutes without air. But they can’t live one second without hope. Valladares, the Brother of the Faith, and that company of Cuban martyrs never lost hope as long as they could shout, “Viva Cristo Rey!” Are you going through a tough spell right now? It might help to grab hold of Armando Valladares’s story and this hope:

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

And so, Lord, where do I put my hope? My only hope is in you.

Psalm 39:7