THE CUBAN dissident Vladimiro Roca Antúnez died in Havana on July 30. He was 80 years old and had lived a life of courage and integrity. Like every dissident with the bravery to resist the lies of Cuba's evil regime, Roca was a genuine hero. But his commitment to freedom and democracy was especially remarkable, for in choosing to buck Cuba's communist dictatorship, he gave up the perks of the entitled life into which he was born.
He was no ordinary dissident. His father was Blas Roca, a founding father of the Cuban Communist Party and a member of Fidel Castro's inner circle until his death in 1987. Vladimiro Roca — his parents named him after Lenin — was raised in privilege, served as a fighter pilot in the Cuban Air Force after training in the Soviet Union, then entered the University of Havana to study economics. After leaving the armed services in 1971, he took a government post as an economist with a focus on international relations. As a scion of one of Cuba's most influential families, it seemed obvious that he was headed for a life of connections and comfort.
But the more Roca saw of the corruption and despotism of Castro's permanent "revolution," the more repelled he was by the system his father had helped create. And so he turned against it, despite everything he stood to lose.
In 1991 Roca founded Cuba's Social Democratic Party — an act of exceptional defiance in a country where only the Communist Party is legal. What Castro's regime had imposed on the island was not socialism, declared Roca publicly, but something "most similar to fascism." The following year, he was expelled from his job.
In 1997, he and three other dissidents — Martha Beatriz Roque, René Gómez Manzano, and Félix Bonne — authored a manifesto calling for democratic elections, respect for human rights, and greater economic freedom. They titled it "La Patria es de Todos" ["The Homeland Belongs to Everyone"] and what they wrote was a ringing call for pluralism and the tolerance of differing views:
The Cuban government ignores the word "opposition." Those of us who do not share its political stance, or who simply don't support it, are considered enemies and any number of other scornful designations. . . . Thus, the government seeks to give a new meaning to the word "homeland," which it distortedly links to Revolution, Socialism, and Nation. They ignore the fact that "homeland," by definition, is the country in which one is born.
The manifesto went on to lament that in Cuba, "the state is not at the service of the citizens." Instead, every citizen is expected to serve the state, which disregards the basic rights "inherent to human beings." The authors called for genuinely democratic self-rule and greater economic freedom. For that they were arrested, subjected to a political show trial, and convicted of "inciting sedition."
 Vladimiro Roca Antúnez, 1942-2023. 𝘘𝘶𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘴𝘦 𝘦𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘻. |
As the Center for a Free Cuba recalled last week in an obituary, "Vladimiro was sentenced to five years in prison, the longest prison sentence of the four. [He] was held in a six-by-seven-foot cell, with a hole in the ground for a toilet and a table serving as a bed; water would run only three times a day for 20 to 30 minutes." He was eventually released in 2002.
It can be difficult for Americans, so accustomed to their civil liberties, to grasp just how much valor it requires for any Cuban citizen to speak out against the tyrants who rule the island 90 miles from the US coast. But the special fearlessness of dissidents like Roca, who knowingly give up social advantage and prestige in order to fight for liberty and democracy, is of an even higher order of magnitude. That was something Roca had in common with Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Soviet physicist who had immense influence and status as one of Moscow's foremost nuclear scientists, but lost it all when he defended the right of "refuseniks" seeking to emigrate. Roca resembled Liu Xiaobo, the noted Chinese philosopher and literary scholar, who threw away a life in the high circles of international academia in order to fight for human rights following the Tiananmen Square massacre. Like them, Roca renounced luxury, honor, and entitlement. He turned against the despots who would have sheltered and caressed him, trading in a life of ease for years of suffering and abuse.
His life was a testament to the light of truth and goodness amid the gloom of deceit and villainy. The nation he loved still bleeds under the cruelty of its communist regime. But that regime will not last forever. Cuba will be free. And Vladimiro Roca's heroism will not be forgotten.
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Kamala Harris's $400 urban legend
During an appearance at Drake University in Des Moines on July 28, Vice President Kamala Harris repeated one of her favorite talking points, inadvertently undermining the administration's recent boast that "Bidenomics" has been a great success.
"Most Americans," Harris told her audience, "are a $400 unexpected expense away from bankruptcy."
In Chicago four days earlier, she had said the same thing virtually word for word: "The average American is a $400 unexpected expense away from bankruptcy."
It's a line Harris has used a lot over the years. In 2019, as a candidate for president, then-Senator Harris told an interviewer that "in our country right now, almost half of American families are a $400 unexpected expense away from complete upheaval. Four hundred dollars! That could be — the car breaks down. That could be a hospital bill you didn't see coming."
If true, that is an alarming statistic. In a nation as wealthy as the United States, it is stupefying to think that scores of millions of Americans would be thrown into "complete upheaval" or reduced to bankruptcy by a $400 expense they didn't see coming. There could hardly be a more devastating indictment of America's economic system or a grimmer indication of how badly inequality and social insecurity have corroded the stability of American society.
But it isn't true.
Harris's factoid is loosely — very loosely — drawn from the Federal Reserve's annual survey on the economic well-being of US households. One of the questions posed to the nearly 12,000 respondents is: "Suppose that you have an emergency expense that costs $400. Based on your current financial situation, how would you pay for this expense?"
Consider for a moment: How would you would pay for it?
 No, most American households would not be devastated financially by an unanticipated $400 expense. |
Assuming you are like most Americans, you would cover the $400 expense with what the Fed calls "cash or its equivalent" — i.e., currency, a check, a debit card, or a credit-card charge that would be paid in full when you got your next statement. According to the latest survey, that is how 63 percent of the public would handle it. Add in another 16 percent who would put the charge on a credit card and pay it off over time, and the share of Americans who could readily handle the unexpected expense rises to 79 percent. A much smaller share of respondents said they would borrow the $400 from a friend or relative, sell something, or draw on other resources, like a payday loan or a line of credit. Only 13 percent of those surveyed said they would be unable to come up with the $400 "right now."
As even the vice president should know, 13 percent is not "most Americans" or "the average American." And not having the wherewithal to cover a sudden $400 expense "right now" is neither bankruptcy nor "complete upheaval." To be sure, some households truly are on the edge of insolvency, and it's conceivable that unexpectedly having to come up with several hundred dollars could yank the rug out from under them. Their plight should not be minimized — but it also shouldn't be exaggerated into a preposterous claim that a majority of US residents can feel the hot breath of bankruptcy breathing down their necks.
Why does Harris keep repeating an assertion that can be so easily debunked? If she hopes to convince her listeners that, as she said over the weekend, "Bidenomics is working," it makes no sense to recycle an urban legend that "most Americans" are one small step away from financial ruin. What the Fed data really show is not only that most American households can take an unforeseen $400 expense in stride, but that even more of them can do so today than could 10 years ago. The economy is not collapsing and most Americans aren't hanging on by a thread. It's not only foolish for Harris to pretend otherwise, but bad politics to boot.
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Starting law school? Read this.
One of my favorite columns is a tribute that I wrote to Daniel G. MacLeod, one of my law professors at Boston University, after he passed away in 1997. I really liked Professor MacLeod's teaching style, which was interesting and relatable and wry, and during my time in law school I took every class that he taught. I joined a big law firm after getting my degree but stuck it out for only 10 months before deciding that I didn't want to spend my life in a vast hive of corporate law. But if MacLeod had been a partner in that firm, things might have been different. Perhaps I would still be practicing law.
"I am sorry that I never let him know how much his teaching meant to me," I wrote. "But I am sorrier for the legal profession, which has lost an exemplary member, and for the teaching profession, which seems to find it harder and harder to attract individuals of such character and intellect. If more lawyers and academics were like Daniel MacLeod, the world would think better of lawyers and academics."
What brings that column to mind is one I've just read by Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and a regular contributor to The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog written by law professors and hosted by Reason magazine. In a short essay last month, Somin offers some cogent "Advice to Entering Law Students." If someone in your life is about to embark on the study of law, it would be a kindness to flag the essay for him or her.
What Somin writes is practical and sensible and I wish someone had laid it out for 20-year-old me before I started law school all those years ago. For example, he urges new law students to bear in mind that there are many ways to practice law for a living and to think carefully about which type of legal career will be a good fit for them. "A person who would be miserable working for a large 'Biglaw' firm might be happy as a public interest lawyer or a family law practitioner," he points out. "Don't just 'go with the flow' in terms of choosing what kind of legal career you want to pursue. The jobs that many of your classmates want may be terrible for you (and vice versa)."
It's an excellent point and one I didn't understand when I was in law school. I did indeed "go with the flow," assuming that the purpose of a legal education was to land a job with the biggest firm possible. It simply never occurred to me that the path to law-career happiness might lie in some other direction. So when I realized that the life of big-firm lawyer wasn't my cup of tea, I left the profession entirely.
Another of Somin's suggestions, though very different, is equally valuable: "Think about whether what you plan to do is right and just."
The practice of law, he observes, "presents more serious moral dilemmas than many other professions" and what lawyers do may deprive people of "their liberty, their property, or even their lives." (It can also prevent people from losing property, liberty, or life.)
"Lawyers have played key roles in almost every major advance for liberty and justice in American history, including the establishment of the Constitution, the antislavery movement, the civil rights movement, and many others," Somin writes.
But they have also been among the major perpetrators of most of the great injustices in our history. . . .
Law school is the right time to start working to ensure that the career you pursue is at least morally defensible. You don't necessarily have a moral obligation to devote your career to doing good. But you should at least avoid exacerbating evil. And it's easier to do that if you think carefully about the issues involved now (when you still have a wide range of options), than if you wait until you are already enmeshed in a job that involves perpetrating injustice. At that point, it may be too late — both for you and (more importantly) for the people harmed.
Sound advice. And no less true, I would observe, for those who pursue careers in the media. Many journalists, too, have accomplished a world of good. And many journalists have likewise been guilty of disgraceful moral dereliction.
Students headed to law school ought to take 10 minutes to read Somin's essay. Come to think of it, so should everyone else.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "A presidency of lies," August 20, 1998:
Presidents, even mediocre ones, are indulged and flattered. They are forgiven much. But at the end of the day, they are expected to behave like presidents. They are expected not to befoul their office, not to act dishonorably, not to be jerks or buffoons or lechers. Not even in private. Not even in their sex lives.
Our long national nightmare is of Clinton's making. He abused his position shamefully, then jabbed his finger at us and denied everything.
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The Last Line
"And the music of the pearl drifted to a whisper and disappeared." — John Steinbeck, The Pearl (1947)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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