Paya Follows Havel's
Lead in Quest for Democracy
While
reading former Czech President Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the
Powerless” for the first time last week, it all hit me with astounding
clarity.
Language.
Language
is the most insidious way in which modern dictatorships maintain their grasp on
power. It is through their control of the means of dialogue that dictatorships
stifle individual thought and will their people into submission. Why? Because
the inversion of language—hidden behind what Havel calls the government's
“ideological gloves”—allows dictatorships to ascribe meaning to the ideas
that threaten them most.
Once
government takes control of language, Havel writes, “government by bureaucracy
is [then] called popular government. The working class is enslaved in the name
of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as
his ultimate liberation; the arbitrary use of power is called observing the
legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the lack of
free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; and farcical elections
become the highest form of democracy.” Once a government can say what is and
isn’t, it forces it’s people to live their lives under it’s own
self-sustaining (and self-destroying) rules.
Havel wrote this in 1978. As a playwright turned activist, he was referring to Czechoslovakia's then-communist government. But his words maintain their veracity today, especially in Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s regime has similarly inverted language. After all, just last month long-time Castro-supporter Harry Belafonte suggested at Havana's annual film festival that freedom of expression exists in Cuba to a greater extent than it does United States when he said that Cuba has the "highest movie-making standards” while censorship is at its peak in America. In a country where even symbolic digs at the government are grounds to ban a film (see: Daniel Diaz Torres' 1991 film “Alice in Wondertown”) and where independent libraries are quelled as soon as they arise, the singer’s comment borders on the outlandish.
But
such doublespeak has become so ubiquitous in Castro's Cuba that it can be said
without hyperbole that the government has successfully co-opted language—only
one of its long line of victims, to be sure, but perhaps its most crucial.
“Civil
liberty,” “free expression,” “popular rule,” “rule of law,”
“individual rights”… these are all desirable traits for a nation to
possess; but the rhetoric of modern dictatorships strips these concepts of all
their actual meaning. Thus people are rendered powerless—they are forced to
live the lie, to accept the discord between concepts and the reality that
surrounds them. They are left to believe that their personal understanding of
these concepts is a specious one and that the true form of these concepts is
what exists around them. The result, Havel writes, is “a profound crisis of
human identity,” a crisis that makes such a disjointed life possible.
It
was only after reading this that I could truly understand why Oswaldo Payá and
others like him in the leadership of Cuba's rising dissident movement could be
considered so dangerous by Castro’s government.
Only
in the illusory world of modern dictatorships, the world where language is
undermined and reality replaced with appearance and ritual, could Payá be
considered an enemy of the state. Only in a world where the subjugation of the
populace can only last as long as people were willing to live within the lie can
those who threaten a communist government’s established lexicon, those who
seek to right-side-up the inverted status quo, become the biggest threats to the
establishment.
“As
long as appearance is not confronted with reality,” Havel writes, “it does
not seem to be appearance.”
But
Payá and others Cuban dissidents are working to change that. And not only have
they found the courage to expose the Cuban government's world of appearances,
but—and this is part that has Castro’s regime worried most—they have
emboldened their fellow citizens to do the same. By calling repression
“repression” and tyranny “tyranny,” Payá has reclaimed language and, in
the process, empowered Cuba's powerless. To date, he has inspired 30,000 Cuban
citizens to sign their name to the Varela Project, his initiative seeking nonviolent reforms on the island
at great risk to themselves. In Havel's words, those are 30,000 more Cubans
“living within the truth.” They have said, “‘the emperor is naked’ and
because the emperor is indeed naked something dangerous has happened. They have
upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together.”
It
is important to remember Havel's words as Payá brings his message to Miami this
week, and as small but vocal minority in the exile community expresses its
concerns over the Varela Project. Understandably they take issue with the fact
that the project uses the dictatorship’s own constitution in its efforts to
bring democratic change to Cuba, thus seemingly legitimizing the regime’s
right to power. But to criticize
Payá’s project on such grounds is to ignore the wisdom acquired by Havel and
the long line of activists who brought down the Eastern Bloc.
Indeed,
Havel and other spokesman of Charter 77—the 1977-formed group that called for
change in communist Czechoslovakia—weathered similar criticisms during their
own struggle, and what he says in his essay goes a long way in showing that Payá,
today, is on the right track.
Because
fatuous regimes cannot survive without the law, Havel writes, because they are
“hopelessly tied down to the necessity of pretending the laws are observed,
[they are] compelled to react in some way” to appeals like Payá’s that
utilize their established laws and constitutions. “Demanding that the laws be
upheld is thus an act of living within the truth that threatens the whole
mendacious structure at its point of maximum mendacity,” he writes. “Such
appeals make the purely ritualistic nature of the law clear to society.”
Payá
understands the system he is opposing. In fact, he understands it very well. So
much so that he is using the Cuban government’s own words to reclaim language
on the island, and is effectively beating them at their own game and working
toward creating a new Cuba in the process, because while Castro might be
ignoring Payá’s advances, the rest of the world is watching.
It should not
have come as a surprise to many last month when Payá was awarded the European
Parliament's Sakharov prize for freedom of expression.
It
is no surprise that Havel and other European activists who brought down the
Eastern bloc have pledged their support to him.
It is now time for all of us in the exile community, in the United States and in the global community as a whole to do the same.
Nicolas H. Calzada
Published in The Miami Herald,
Nicolás Calzada is a graduate of Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in West Dade and Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in History. He currently lives in New York City and is a film student at New York University.
© Nicolas Calzada 2003