March 07, 2005, 7:39 a.m.
Solidarity, Exemplified
The amazing story of the Czechs and the Cubans.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the March 14, 2005, issue of National Review.

"I am not one of Fidel Castro’s favorite people,” said Václav Havel in February 2001. The millennium is still young, but that should end up one of its greatest understatements. The former Czech president — and still the guiding spirit in that country — is a constant irritant to the Castro dictatorship, even a threat. So is the Czech government at large. Indeed, ordinary Cubans have no better friends than the Czechs, and their relationship makes an amazing story.

That relationship was highlighted by recent events within the European Union. In January, the EU moved to lift sanctions it had imposed on Castro in 2003. This was after the dictator’s brutal crackdown, jailing 75 dissidents. Most remarkably, EU embassies in Havana started to invite dissidents — those still out of prison — to receptions and other official functions. But when the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero came to power in Spain, he determined to remove the sanctions on Castro. And Spain has traditionally gotten its way on EU Cuba policy. Part of the drive was to prohibit invitations to dissidents; these had greatly infuriated the regime, and Zapatero wanted to play nice.

But the Czechs — new in the EU — would have none of it. They did everything they could to frustrate the new policy. Martin Palouš, the Czech Republic’s ambassador in Washington, says, “We wanted to be EU partners; we were not keen to destroy their unity.” But neither could the Czechs stomach the policy. And when dissidents in Cuba cried against it, “we reminded everyone that their voices had to be taken into consideration first.” Note that “first” — it is a very Czech conviction.

On January 28, Havel weighed in, with his mighty pen. In an essay published in newspapers around the world, he excoriated the EU, saying it had abandoned principle, conscience, and reason. He spoke of his own time as a dissident, when it was important to meet with diplomats from democratic countries. But now, “one of the strongest and most powerful democratic institutions in the world — the European Union — has no qualms about making a public promise to the Cuban dictatorship that it will re-institute diplomatic apartheid. The EU’s embassies in Havana will now craft their guest lists in accordance with the Cuban government’s wishes.”..

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