Havel’s Advice to the Cubans (and Others)
From the text of a speech Czech President Vaclav Havel today delivers in Florida, but directs to a Cuban audience via Radio Marti:

“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 an 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 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 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.”

- posted by Amy @ 9/23/2002 12:48:00 PM