Cuban dictator Fidel Castro (left) imprisoned and tortured Armando Valladares (right) for
refusing to support the communist revolution with sufficient ardor.

Imagine a professor at a popular Division I university sending an email to an ex-political prisoner, who spent 22 years in a Cuban gulag, simply to insult and harangue him for expressing an opinion on his oppressor. The target of the hate-mail was Armando Valladares, who was declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International when he was locked up and tortured in a Cuban prison for 22 years. The email, sent directly to Valladares, told the aging victim that he “deserve(d) to be in jail” because of the “stupidities that you wrote.”