Posted on 03/17/2002 1:20:11 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:07:33 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Andrew
From Nordlinger's LINK at Post #1
[Excerpt] So, there are a couple of names named: Rene Montes de Oca Martija and Jose Orlando Gonzalez Bridon. There are thousands of others, belonging to thousands of other political prisoners. Hear (merely) three more: Vladimiro Roca, Jorge Luis Garcia Perez, and Maritza Lugo Fernandez. These names mean nothing in our country, except to Cuban-Americans. Perhaps the most inspiring name of all is that of Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet Gonzalez, a virtual saint of the resistance. Biscet is a practitioner of civil disobedience in the tradition of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, his avowed models. He has been imprisoned and tortured since 1998. We know, through his wife, that he has blessed and forgiven his torturers even as they have tortured him. Here is a man-Biscet-whose name should be on many lips. Cuban dissidents complain bitterly that if he were a prisoner of a right-wing regime he would be a worldwide cause. Yet he is anonymous; not even his dark skin seems able to help him. The stream of American celebrities who go to Havana to sup, smoke, and banter with "Fidel" are oblivious.
One man who has thought long and hard about this is Armando Valladares. He is the most famed of the dissidents, the author or the memoir Against All Hope, one of the most powerful testaments of this age. Valladares persevered through years of imprisonment and torture, showing almost unfathomable courage, of every kind: physical, political, spiritual. Eventually he came to the United States, where he has devoted his life to truth-telling. Valladares has earned the designation "the Cuban Solzhenitsyn." One of the most bracing things President Reagan ever did, of many was name Valladares U.S. delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
Valladares divides those Americans who are neutral or friendly toward the Communists regime into two groups: those who lack information (a majority, he says, perhaps generously), and those-politicians, intellectuals, journalists-who should know better, to put it mildly. "I look at this from a psychological point of view," says Valladares. "Many Americans hate their won society, for whatever reason. Perhaps they have failed to attain their goals. So they sympathize with anyone who attacks American society. The cliché 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend' applies here. And remember: The most envied, the most hated country in the world is the United States of America. I felt this clearly during my years as U.S. representative in Geneva." [End Excerpt]
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