Name Jorge Valls | Role Poet | |
Books Twenty years and forty days | ||
Jorge valls habla pt 1
Jorge Valls Arango (February 2, 1933 – October 22, 2015) was a Cuban activist and poet of who spent more than two decades in prison for his opposition to Fidel Castro.
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He was born in Mañanan, now part of Havana. He was the son of a Catalan father and Cuban mother, and could read and write Catalan. He was first arrested in 1952 while a student at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Havana, when he demonstrated his opposition to the 1952 Batista coup d'état. In 1956, he joined the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil, a student group fighting the new regime.
He was arrested as a political activist by Fidel Castro in 1964. He spent more than 20 years behind bars in many Cuban prisons and was released in 1984. After his release, he moved to Miami, Florida where in 1986, he wrote a book Twenty Years and Forty Days: Life in a Cuban Prison, in which he speaks about his experiences behind bars. He also published a couple of poem books in Spanish including Donde estoy no hay luz y está enrejado. He was the international secretary of the Democratic Social-Revolutionary Party of Cuba.
He died of cancer in 2015.