"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
The Presidential Medal of Freedom will be awarded Monday in absentia to Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet.
Dr. Biscet is a Cuban prisoner of conscience. Jay Nordlinger writes:
He is one of the bravest and most inspired of the Cuban political prisoners. He is a physician, an “Afro-Cuban,” a follower of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King. If he were a prisoner of anyone but Castro — a Communist dictator — he’d be world-famous. If he were a South African, under apartheid, he’d be on the stamps of virtually every country in the world.
Let me continue in this vein: If he were a prisoner under a right-wing dictatorship, he’d be featured on 60 Minutes every week. He’d be on the cover of Time magazine every week. College campuses would hold sit-ins. Biscet’s face would adorn posters and T-shirts. Etc., etc.
A picture of a phone-booth-sized cell, similar to the one in which Dr. Biscet is confined, accompanies Jeff Jacoby's tribute to "a hero in Castro's gulag."
My father was born and raised in Cuba, and he trained to be a medical doctor. Working in Castro's hospitals, he saw firsthand the regime's terrible policy of enforced abortions. He publicly objected to this practice, and lost his job and his license as a result. He went on to found an organization, the Lawton Foundation for Human Rights.
For his activism, my father has been punished severely by the Castro regime. He has spent almost a decade in prison, and is serving a 25-year sentence. He has been held in inhumane conditions, sometimes together with violent criminals, and at other times in isolation and total darkness for extended periods. He has lost more than 40 pounds as well as most of his teeth. His crime? Calling for respect for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Cuba.
For decades, various American journalists and celebrities have rhapsodized about Castro's supposed island paradise, resolutely ignoring the mountains of evidence that it is in reality a tropical dungeon. Intent on seeing Castro as a revolutionary hero and Cuba as Shangri-la, they avert their gaze from the island's genuine heroes - the prisoners of conscience like Biscet, who pay a fearful price for their insistence on telling the truth. #
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