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Jay Nordlinger: Who Cares About Cuba***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."***

Fidel Castro - Cuba

1 posted on 11/16/2002 3:12:24 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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2 posted on 11/16/2002 10:25:35 AM PST by Free the USA
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