Mr. President,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,
And to all those citizens of Cuba who are listening to us,
I am here in Florida for the first time in my life.
My sojourn in Florida will also be my last in the United States
– indeed in the whole American continent –as President
of my country. It was my own choice to come to Florida, and I
have chosen it, among other things, because it is from here that
I want to extend my greetings to all Cubans – both to those
who live here, and to those who live at home, in Cuba.
Every modern, freedom-loving person feels, or at
least ought to feel, a sense of solidarity both with those who
are prevented from living in their home country or from freely
visiting it, as well as with those who are forced to live in their
country in a state of constant fear, and who cannot leave it and
return to it of their own free will.
But there are people who should naturally feel
this kind of solidarity far more intensively than others. I am
referring to those of us who experienced first hand, upon our
own flesh, as it were, the oppressive weight of life under a totalitarian
system of the communist type, or who may even have tried to resist
that system and, in doing so, experienced just how important was
the solidarity and help offered by people from freer countries.
I think that one of the most diabolical instruments
for subjugating some people and fooling others is the unique language
of Communism. It is a language full of subterfuge, ideological
jargon, meaningless phrases and stereotypical figures of speech.
To people who have not seen through its deceit or who have never
had to live in a world manipulated by it, this language can appear
very attractive. At the same time, in others, this very same language
can evoke fear and horror, and force them into a permanent state
of pretense.
In my country, too, entire generations of people
once let themselves be led astray by this kind of language, with
its fine words about justice, peace and the imperative to fight
against those who, allegedly in the interest of evil foreign powers,
resisted the power that this language wielded. The great advantage
of this language lies in the fact that all its parts are firmly
bound together in a closed system of dogmas that excludes anything
that does not fit in with it. Any idea with a hint of originality
or independence – as well as any word that is not part of
the official vocabulary – is labeled an ideological diversion
– almost, it would seem, before anyone can express it. The
web of dogmas deployed to justify any arbitrary action by the
ruling power, therefore, usually takes a utopian form –
that is, an artificial construct that contains a whole set of
reasons why everything that does not fit its structure or that
reaches beyond it must be suppressed, forbidden or destroyed for
the sake of some happy future.
The easy thing to do is to accept this language,
to believe in it or, at least, to adapt to it. It is very difficult
to maintain one’s own point of view, though common sense
may tell you a hundred times over that you are right, as long
as that means either revolting against the language of the powers-that-be,
or simply refusing to use it. A system of persecutions, of bans,
of informers, of compulsory elections, of spying on one’s
neighbors, of censorship and, ultimately, of concentration camps
is hidden behind a veil of beautiful words that have utterly no
shame in calling enslavement a “higher form of freedom,”
of calling independent thinking a way of “supporting imperialism,”
or labeling the entrepreneurial spirit a way of “impoverishing
one’s fellow humans” and calling human rights a “bourgeois
fiction.”
My country’s experience was simple: when
the internal crisis of the totalitarian system grows so deep that
it becomes clear to everyone, and when more and more people learn
to speak their own language and reject the hollow, mendacious
language of the powers that be, it means that freedom is remarkably
close, if not directly within reach. All of a sudden, it seems
that the emperor has no clothes, and the mysterious radiant energy
that comes from free speech and free actions turns out to be more
powerful than the strongest army, police force, or party organization,
stronger than the greatest power of a centrally directed and centrally
devastated economy, or of the centrally controlled and centrally
enslaved media, those chief propagators of the mendacious language
of the official utopia.
Our world, as a whole, is not in the best of shapes,
and the direction in which it is headed may well be quite ambivalent.
But this does not mean that we may give up on free and cultivated
thinking, to replace it with a set of utopian clichés.
That would not make the world a better place. It would only make
it worse. On the contrary, it means that we must do more for our
own freedom, and that of others.
May all Cubans live in freedom and enjoy independence
and prosperity!
To all those who have not lost the will to resist
arbitrary force and lies, may your dreams be fulfilled!
And may Oswald Payá Sardiñas, the
great champion of human rights in Cuba, be awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize, and may this award strengthen the courage of all the Cuban
people to take up non-violent resistance against an oppressive
regime!
Thank you for being here and for listening to me.
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