[Excerpt] Robert Conquest points out that Western defenders of the Soviet Union were "always more anti-American than they were pro-Soviet"; so it is in the case of Cuba. Jeane Kirkpatrick finds it astonishing that "some of our elites are actually proud of their indifference to Cuba's victims, or China's, or Burma's. It is in bad taste, intellectually, to give much thought to these victims." And "frankly, there is something perverse about the hostility to anti-Communists." We saw in the Elian affair, she says, that Cubans in the United States are close to a pariah community…….
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Valladares has a ready answer to this business of "good things," given with patience and weariness: Say these things have been accomplished (which is laughable, but leave that aside). Could they not have been accomplished without torturing people? Without imprisoning them? Without denying them all rights? Is material well-being incompatible with human freedom? Besides which, few people go out of their way to stress the material achievements of other dictators; autobahns and so forth. The likes of Jose Serrano do not pause to acknowledge Chile's economic explosion. And then there is the matter of Castro's sheer longevity as dictator. Says Valladares, "I was talking to an American, A Democrat, the other day. I said to him, 'How would you like it if Richard Nixon got to be president for over forty years?' The man almost shrieked in horror." …………
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The oppositionists and their supports are extraordinarily, even disturbingly, grateful for any sincere attention they receive. They are accustomed to being snubbed or defamed. Another exile writes, "Prisoners cling to newspaper articles about human rights in Cuba as their only hope against being abandoned and forgotten. The sense of helplessness, that no one is listening, that no one cares, is what kills their souls. I've known many such people, including within my own family."
Back in the Reagan years, Jeane Kirkpatrick became a heroine in the Soviet Union for the simple act of naming names on the floor of the U.N.: naming the names of prisoners, citing their cases, inquiring after their fates. Later, in Moscow, she met Andrei Sakharov, who exclaimed, "Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski! I have so wanted to meet you and thank you in person. Your name is known in all the Gulag." And why was that? Because she had named those names, giving men and women in the cells a measure of hope. Kirkpatrick says now, "This much I have learned: It is very, very important to say the names, to speak them. It's important to go on taking account as one becomes aware of the prisoners and the torture they undergo. It's terribly important to talk about it, write about it, go on TV about it." A tyrannical regime depends on silence, darkness. "One of their goals is to make their opponents vanish. They want not only to imprison them, they want no one to have heard of them, no one to know who or where they are. So to just that extent, it's tremendously important that we pay attention." [End Excerpt]
Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet Gonzalez , Rene Montes de Oca Martija, Jose Orlando Gonzalez Bridon, Vladimiro Roca, Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, and Maritza Lugo Fernandez Bernardo Arevalo Padron, there are thousands of others and it is important to say their names.