June 30, 2004

Baby Steps

You have to learn to walk before you learn to run, and you have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk.

Freedom takes baby steps in Cuba:

PINAR DEL RÍO, June 28 (Rafael Ferro Salas, Abdala Press / www.cubanet.org) - A retired Interior Ministry officer who now works as a security guard at a local dollar store barred young Alexander Toledo when he saw him wearing a t-shirt with a dissident logo.

Toledo said the graphic image is of a Cuban flag next to a black number 75, for the 75 dissidents and journalists imprisoned in a massive raid in March of last year.

Toledo said the man knows him from the neighborhood, and knows that he is a dissident. "As soon as he saw me coming he told me I couldn't go into the store. From his position he takes the liberty of keeping me from my rights. These are the sort of things that we government opponents go through almost daily."

The symbol of the 75 has been occasioning incidents since it was released between those wearing it and the authorities.

That's the way it begins. A few with enough courage to speak out, some with the audacity to listen. Word begins to spread clandestinely, then it starts to be the topic of whispered conversation on the streets and in homes... It starts out as a crawl.

You start to see graffitti on walls, flyers posted on poles. Then you see a guy wearing a tshirt with the symbol of freedom on it, then you see two, and three, and four...

Brave are those takers of baby steps. They will be the first to take the run of freedom.

Posted by Val Prieto at June 30, 2004 06:32 AM |

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Comments

Val, we need to make some shirts like that...--s

Posted by: j.scott barnard at June 30, 2004 09:42 AM

Symbols are powerful. This is good news.

JdB

Posted by: Jerome du Bois at June 30, 2004 10:11 AM

Posted by: thinkloi at June 30, 2004 10:43 AM

Man, THINKLOI, this guy's a real dweeb...

August Nimtz
Professor
CLA Teaching Award

Well all I have to say to "professor" Nimitz is, if communism is so great and Castro so wonderful...then why are you here? Get the hell out of this "horrible" country and go live under this utopian society you preach about to everyone.

"People" like him make me want to just plain puke. Funny how the Lefties all come here to live and to tell us how bad we are and how great the system works elsewhere.

HYPOCRITES and CHARLATANS, one and all...

Posted by: WB at June 30, 2004 10:54 AM

The freedom vote I look for that seems to cut through all the rhetorical chaff, seems to involve people voting with their feet.

Posted by: Rtfm at June 30, 2004 01:55 PM