This stunning post from Capital Hill Cubans serves as a reminder to those celebrating this weeks OAS decision on Cuba:
“Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.” –Elie Weisel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, April 12, 1999
This morning, U.S. President Barack Obama visited the former Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald with Elie Weisel, where they dedicated a minute of silence to the 56,000 people that were executed at that site during the Holocaust.
Across the Atlantic, pursuant to the Organization of American States’ decision to repeal the 1962 that suspended Cuba’s dictatorship from its ranks, President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras — who together with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega led the efforts to revoke the 1962 resolution — gloated that with this gesture by the OAS, “Fidel Castro has been acquitted by history.”
Despite the Western Hemisphere’s condemnable indifference, the only thing history will record is that the Cuban people — like all other victims of tyranny throughout modern history, whether Jewish, Armenian, Rwandan or Sudanese — will never forget the countless victims of the brutal dictatorship they have been subjected to.
Below is a picture of Raul Castro personally overseeing the execution of a colleague in the rebel army, and of the Cuban National Memorial in South Florida, where tens of thousands of crosses each carry the name of a victim of Cuba’s dictatorship.
Read “The Perils of Indifference.”