Alvaro Vargas Llosa
From: The Australian
April 08, 2010 12:00AM
NOWADAYS, most of those who die for a cause either perish for the wrong
cause or in order to bring death to innocent people.
Islamist and nationalist terrorists have turned the noble concept of
martyrdom into the opposite of what we were taught it meant.
We have gone from Socrates elegantly drinking hemlock in the name of
philosophical inquiry to the female bombers who massacred dozens of
Russians in Moscow by blowing up two metro trains.
But in a godforsaken corner of the Western hemisphere, as if taking it
upon themselves to restore the old tradition of martyrdom, a group of
people has decided to die for a cause and harm no one else in the process.
For weeks the world has followed the drama of the Cuban prisoners of
conscience, many of them black, who have started a chain of hunger
strikes demanding the liberation of their fellow prisoners.
Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
Related Coverage
* Hunger strike ends in death for dissident Adelaide Now, 24 Feb 2010
* Tour groups gear up for Cuba return Herald Sun, 18 Dec 2009
* Cuban spies gets US prison terms reduced Adelaide Now, 9 Dec 2009
* Cuban spy re-sentenced Adelaide Now, 13 Oct 2009
* Cuban revolutionary commander dies Adelaide Now, 12 Sep 2009
End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
Orlando Zapata Tamayo, a mason who was one of the 75 activists and
journalists incarcerated in what is known as the Black Spring of 2003,
died in late February after a hunger strike that lasted more than 80 days.
He was succeeded by psychologist Guillermo Farinas, who has now refused
to eat for more than a month and has contracted a staph infection.
Engineer Felix Bonne Carcasses has announced that if Farinas dies, he
will replace him. Others are waiting, no less determined.
While these men give up their existence for a principle, a group of
women symbolically dressed in white are also putting their lives on the
line by taking to the streets day in and day out against the Castro
brothers, whom they consider the murderers of Zapata and those who may
follow. The Ladies in White - mothers, wives and sisters of the Cuban
political prisoners incarcerated in the 2003 crackdown - have been
kicked, punched, headlocked, dragged through the streets, insulted and
arrested by mobs of government thugs. And they have not flinched.
The international commotion is such that political, civic and artistic
leaders who until recently turned the other way in the face of a
half-century of political persecutions in Cuba have felt compelled to
express - cough, cough - their discomfort. Even Spain's government,
which was instrumental in blocking efforts by the European Union to
defend human rights in Cuba, belatedly has criticised the repression.
In Havana, folk singer Silvio Rodriguez, a revolutionary leader of the
nueva trova musical movement, has begun to talk about taking the "r" out
of revolution and replacing it with evolution.
In Miami, New York and Los Angeles, under the leadership of
Cuban-American celebrities such as Gloria Estefan and Andy Garcia,
thousands of people have marched in protest.
Cuban martyrdom is not new; whether we speak of those Don Quixotes who
took up arms against the revolution early on, the many would-be Mandelas
who rotted in prison with no fame, or the families who perished aboard
rafts trying to flee the island, giving a moral meaning to the Spanish
word balsa.
But this feels different. In his Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion,
Robert Wuthnow states that "a crescive society, one that is weak but on
the rise, produces martyrs like those of early Christianity". Their
willingness to die "affirms the priority of culture over nature, law and
civilisation over biological self-interest".
The gradual rise of a civil society built on the foundations of law and
civilisation amid the barbaric communist tyranny is precisely what these
men and women are announcing to the world, and to their fellow Cubans,
mostly barred from knowing what is happening by a news blockade.
What a defining moment for Cuba; it is comparable to the rise of the
civil society that made possible 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I remember my teacher explaining that the Greek origin of the word
martyr was not directly related to the concept of death. It meant,
simply, witness. Later, the Christian tradition of martyrdom, probably
inaugurated by St Stephen, gave it its new meaning; every other religion
has its own version. When least expected, it has fallen on a group of
valiant Cuban men and women not only to restore the noble tradition
sullied in our day by genocidal terrorists but also the original meaning
of the word martyr. As witnesses, they are testifying the truth, indeed
a deadly truth.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa is a senior fellow at the US Independent Institute
and editor of Lessons from the Poor.
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