Against All Hope. Armando Valladares

and democratic countries. I recall, for example, Elementary Principles of Marxist Philosophy by George Pulitzer, translated into Spanish; Soviet economics textbooks; and Russian novels from the Communist period. There were also propaganda magazines published for foreigners by the Eastern Bloc countries of Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and others.

      The objective of the easing of the rules against reading matter was to flood us with propaganda and indoctrinate us. The authorities knew that the majority of the prisoners were campesinos, workers, and soldiers, and that well-educated and politically aware prisoners were in the minority. Reading the material the propagandists sent in to us would confuse more than one of the prisoners, and we would have a continuous struggle against the massive indoctrination which they were trying to pull off with those books.