In Impromptus today, I write a little about the Bay of Pigs, which took place 50 years ago. I write, in particular, about Obama and this event. (He and Daniel Ortega had an exchange about this two years ago.) But here in the Corner, I’d like to draw your attention to another president, Kennedy, who spoke in the Orange Bowl on December 29, 1962. He accepted the flag of the Cuban Invasion Brigade. And he said, “I want to express my great appreciation to the brigade for making the United States the custodian of this flag. I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana.”

In the course of his remarks, he also said,

The brigade comes from behind prison walls, but you leave behind you more than six million of your fellow countrymen who are also in a very real sense in prison, for Cuba is today, as Martí described it many years ago, as beautiful as Greece, and stretched out in chains — a prison, moated by water.

In the current National Review, there is a piece about Dr. Óscar Elías Biscet, the Cuban democracy leader who has just been released from prison, after twelve (horrid) years. He told me that he considers Cuba “the big prison” while El Combinado del Este, where he and so many other dissidents have been confined, is “the little prison.” He also said, “We who live under this dictatorship look to the sea and know that the sea is our prison bars.”

Back to Kennedy:

. . . your small brigade is a tangible reaffirmation that the human desire for freedom and independence is essentially unconquerable. Your conduct and valor are proof that although Castro and his fellow dictators may rule nations, they do not rule people; that they may imprison bodies, but they do not imprison spirits; that they may destroy the exercise of liberty, but they cannot eliminate the determination to be free.

If you’d like to read the speech — a bracer, and all too relevant now — go here.