TOLERANCE AND FREEDOM

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Delivered during the acceptance of the Freedom Award
Madrid, March 21, 2007

I thank the Autonomous Community of Madrid and its president, Doña Esperanza Aguirre, for the high distinction of receiving the 2007 Tolerance Award, an award presented two years ago to my dear compatriot Raúl Rivero, an extraordinary poet, and very especially because today I share that honor with Mrs. Khady Koita, an admirable fighter for the right of girls and women to not be mutilated against their will because of atavistic rituals that are deeply damaging to the dignity of persons, an absurd ceremony that should have no place in our times.

Also, it so happens that we are joined by Mrs. Pilar Elías, the widow of Ramón Baglietta, an honorable Spaniard cowardly murdered by the ETA, who received the award in 2006. Mrs. Elías, a woman who learned to raise her civic and moral strength above the natural desires of vengeance, last year shook world public opinion with her amazing story -- Mr. Baglietta once saved the life of a boy named Kándido Aspiazu, who later grew up and became Mr. Baglietta's assassin. But her pain served to illustrate something that today, thanks to the general knowledge of her example, can be better understood: the struggle in Spain is not between those who wish to found an independent nation and those who oppose the idea, but between a gang of murderers intent on imposing their will upon the huge majority of the people through intimidation and crime, and some citizens intent on defending with their lives the rule of law and the democratic institutions.

I must add, with satisfaction, that it is especially significant for me to have been selected as the recipient of this award by a committee presided by Doña Esperanza Aguirre, a friend and permanent ally in the effort to disseminate the liberal ideals, who also has always sided with the Cuban democrats, defending them from all the abuses inflicted by the communist dictatorship, even in political circumstances where she could only garner frustrations and criticism.

About tolerance

The most urgent and precise definition of tolerance may be this: the decision to coexist respectfully with something we do not like, even if we have a potential ability to supress it or avoid it. To be tolerant does not mean that we approve of or applaud customs and activities that we consider uncomfortable, disagreeable or antiesthetical, but that we admit ruefully that life is plural, diverse, ever-changing, and that we humans can maintain concord and achieve a certain degree of happiness only if our behavior is guided by our most intimate convictions. When a person obligates another, by force, to subscribe to certain points of view or certain ways of life, when he imposes on the other a strange vision of the cosmos, he commits a terrible crime against the other person's conscience.

To live in peace with ourselves, we humans require a degree of internal consistency. We need to freely search for, or express, our religious beliefs and our doubts, our particular ways of dressing, or enjoying literary and artistic expressions. We need to satisfy our particular intellectual curiosity and to express, also freely, our opinions and our affective preferences. In sum, we need to be ourselves, without disguising our voices, without donning a mask and without resorting to hypocrisy to survive.

There is no state, political party or ideological or religious organization that knows better than we ourselves what we want and what suits us best. There is no entity capable of making decisions of any type for our benefit better than those decisions we ourselves can make, even when we err, because freedom also includes risks that must be assumed responsibly. In sum, there is no ogre more harmful than the philanthropic ogre, in the words of Octavio Paz, that brillian Mexican poet who was honored with the Nobel Prize.

Freedom is not a luxury but an imperative necessity of our conscience. When we are not free, when we are forced to feign, when others impose upon us dogmas, rituals, sacred books, conducts and ideas that run contrary to our true personal beliefs, we experience a painful dissonance that frequently becomes a distressing feeling of falsehood. We become phonies, and that posture slowly turns into a deep psychological malaise, a neurosis, as Carl Rogers, one of the most important psychologists of the 20th Century, pointed out.

Unfortunately, we are still very far from living in a world presided by mutual respect. The 20th Century was especially prolific in intolerant attitudes. When the Marxists banned books and the fascists burned them, when the communists put "enemies of the people" before the firing squad and the Nazis gassed Jews, that criminal conduct fed from the fatal combination of ideological certainty -- the arrogance of someone who believes he possesses a single and indisputable truth -- and the rejection of diversity. Whoever was different had to be extirpated violently from the bosom of society.

Intolerance in Cuba

Once total contempt for anyone who is different has been incubated, intolerance emerges with ease, skillfully camouflaged behind a patriotic language that allows some to mistreat the chosen enemy without limitations, or crush him if necessary -- or if amusing. In my country, Cuba, to the misfortune of Cubans, the nation's leaders have no doubts. They have interpreted the past and the present in an infallible manner. They have foreseen the future in an unequivocable way.

They know everything and therefore feel authorized to exterminate whoever dares to dissent, as happens to the democrats who ask for an open government, designed freely by society in pluralistic elections such as those that exist in Spain and in the 30 happiest countries in the world.

Just about now, four years have elapsed since the so-called Black Spring, when 75 peaceable democrats from the opposition were rounded up and sentenced to harsh terms of up to 25 years' imprisonment for writing uncensored articles in foreign newspapers, lending forbidden books, or requesting a referendum at the polls. Of those people, only a few have been released: those who were sick and enjoyed international notoriety.

The rest, meaning almost everyone, remain incarcerated under the worst conditions, subjected to beatings and constant humiliation. Meanwhile, the women in their families, the worthy Ladies in White -- represented in Spain by Blanca Reyes, who was one of them -- mothers, daughters and wives of the prisoners march through the streets silently, whenever the occasion seems opportune, asking for the release of their loved ones, even though at times they are harassed by the mobs organized and dispatched by the government.

Unfortunately, these 75 men are not the only prisoners of conscience in the country. The more reliable human rights organizations talk of about 300, and some prisoners already have served 15 years behind bars, a fact that should not surprise us, considering that we're dealing with the Cuban dictatorship. A few weeks ago, Mario Chanes, a former labor leader, died in Miami. Earlier, he had served 30 years in Cuban prisons, under the worst possible conditions.

Along with Fidel Castro and others, he had raided the Moncada army barracks and had sailed on the Granma as an expeditionist, two key events in the revolutionary movement begun by Castro. But Mario Chanes was not a communist and abhorred dictatorship, so Castro was especially cruel and vengeful toward him, as he usually is toward friends or subordinates who dare to contradict him.

Nevertheless, not all the news coming from the island are bad. Although the rigors of tyranny do not ease, there is in society -- including the opposition and the more lucid people in government -- a generalized conviction that we are at the final stage of a long nightmare that has extended for almost half a century. Almost no one believes that communism can survive for long after the death of the caudillo who imposed it. Almost everyone believes that a failed system, mounted on the fallacies of Marxism and organized along the lines of the inefficient and now extinguished Soviet model, cannot prevail much longer in a world where the ideas of freedom have triumphed.

That is why Spain is a very important reference for Cubans. That is why we anxiously look toward the Mother Country. We dream of a peaceful transition to democracy and freedom similar to that which Spaniards were able to build in the last quarter of the previous century. And we also dream (why not?) of someday having the opportunity, in a free Havana, to repay -- with a hug filled with gratitude -- the solidarity extended to us by the good Spaniards like those who today, to help us in our struggle, have had the generosity of presenting me with the prestigious Tolerance Award.

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