10/02/2002

EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-10164

HAVEL ON CASTRO'S CUBA

Vaclav Havel is one of the world's foremost champions of human rights. A man who defied the Communist system in his native Czechoslovakia, President Havel rose to became a key figure in post-Soviet democratic reforms and president of the Czech Republic. Throughout his life, President Havel has been on the front lines in the struggle between freedom and totalitarianism. That is why his recent comments on Fidel Castro's Cuba are so instructive.

Speaking of Cuba's system of government, President Havel said, "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."

Governments like Castro's, said President Havel, repress dissent in all its forms. "Any idea with a hint of originality or independence, any word that is not part of the official vocabulary, is labeled an ideological diversion. Everything that does not fit [Communism's] structure or that reaches beyond it must be suppressed, forbidden, or destroyed."

President Havel spoke of "the oppressive weight of life under a totalitarian system." "A system of persecutions, of bans, of informers, of compulsory elections, of spying on one’s neighbors, of censorship and, ultimately, of concentration camps," he said, "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."

President Havel said he is hoping for the end of Communism in Cuba and commended those dissidents, both inside and outside the country, who oppose Castro and his system. "Every modern, freedom-loving person," he said, "feels. . . .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."

The Cuban people want the same freedoms and

rights that citizens of other nations enjoy. For their sake, it is time for Fidel Castro to cast aside his old and failed ideas. As Czech President Vaclav Havel said, "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!"