Jay Nordlinger: Who Cares About Cuba? ****Cubans and Cuban-Americans feel a persistent hurt over the general American attitude toward them. One exile in Boca Raton reports that he can no longer talk with his Anglo neighbors about his homeland. "If I explain to them the reality of Cuban life, all I get is, 'Oh, you're a right-winger,' or, 'You're biased against President Castro.' Can you imagine being biased against the tyrant who deprives you of rights, throws you in jail, and makes life so intolerable as to force you into the open sea on a homemade raft? Many Cubans especially resent this honorific "President" before Castro, as if the dictator were the equivalent of a democratic leader. Worse is the affectionate, pop-star-ish "Fidel." We would never hear, for Pinochet, "Augusto." Gus!
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."
Indignation and concern are not inexhaustible, of course; no one, including Americans, can watch the fall of every sparrow (although, somehow, it seemed possible in South Africa). But American attention is a powerful thing; so is an American consensus. "Fidel will eventually die," some people say, with a shrug. But certain other people have waited long enough. ****