FROM COMMUNISM TO DEMOCRACY: THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS

FROM COMMUNISM TO DEMOCRACY: THE POWER OF THE POWERLESS

Texto Integro
Colaboración:
Gerardo Martínez-Solanas
E.U.
Columnista
La Nueva Cuba
Septiembre 23, 2002

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, and Florida is also the last
state in the United States -and the last place on the whole American
continent -that I will be visiting 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, and 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, on our own skins, 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 the solidarity and help offered by people from freer
countries was.

I think that one of the most diabolical instruments for subjugating some
people and fooling others is the special Communist language. It is a
language full of subterfuge, ideological jargon, meaningless phrases and
stereotypical figures of speech. To people who have not seen through its
mendacity 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
permanent state of simulation.

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 necessity of fighting against those who, allegedly in the
interests of evil foreign powers, resisted the power that spoke this
language. 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. Any idea with a hint of originality
or independence -as well as any word that is not 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 the 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 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 a 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
necomes visible that the king is naked 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 shape and the direction it
is headed in may well be quite ambivalent. But this does not mean that
we are permitted to give up on free and cultivated thinking and to
replace it with a set of utopian cliches. 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 Oswaldo 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.

President Václav Havel

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