THE STATE DEPARTMENT on Friday announced this year's recipients of the International Women of Courage Award, an honor bestowed annually by the American secretary of state on individuals "who have demonstrated exceptional courage, strength, and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equality, and the empowerment of women and girls." Among those being recognized this year is one of Cuba's greatest living heroes.
Martha Beatriz Roque is a 78-year-old dissident who for more than three decades has championed human rights and democracy in her homeland, which is ruled by the oldest dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere. An economist and former professor of statistics at the University of Havana, Roque first fell afoul of Fidel Castro's communist regime when she praised Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms in the Soviet Union. Many academics would have reverted to silence once they realized the government that controlled their salary was displeased with their comments. But Roque's career of speaking truth to power was just beginning.
In 1997, she and three other dissidents — Vladimiro Roca, Félix Bonne, and René Gómez Manzano — published a report criticizing Cuba's communist economy and urging a peaceful transition to democracy. Titled "La Patria es de Todos" ("The Homeland Belongs to Everyone"), it was a ringing call for pluralism and tolerance. The manifesto decried the Cuban government's disregard for basic rights "inherent to human beings." The authors pleaded for democratic self-rule and economic freedom. For that offense, they were arrested, charged with spreading "enemy propaganda," and convicted in a one-day show trial that was closed to the public.
Roque spent nearly three years behind bars. In May 1998, she managed to smuggle out a letter written on toilet paper; it described the terrible health conditions and relentless political indoctrination to which she and her co-defendants were subjected. Canada's then-prime minister Jean Chrétien intervened personally with Castro for her release. So did Pope John Paul II. The dictator rebuffed them both.
Not until May 2000 was Roque set free. Undaunted, she promptly resumed her human rights work.
 Martha Beatriz Roque, 78, has championed human rights and democracy in Cuba for more than 30 years. |
I had the honor of meeting Roque at her home in Havana in 2002. She welcomed me cheerfully to her meager apartment, saying she was glad of the chance to practice her English. She had been detained 17 times by the authorities, she told me, showing me the gouges on the door frame caused by the police the last time they had ransacked her house. "They took everything I could use to write," she laughed. "Even my pencil. And every piece of paper."
She assumed she was under surveillance, she said as she handed me an espresso her assistant brought from the kitchen, but she wasn't about to stop her work. She had already spent nearly three years in prison and she would go back if she had to.
A year later, she had to.
During the "Black Spring" crackdown the following year, Roque was once again arrested, tried, and convicted. Of the 75 dissidents, reformers, and pro-democracy advocates rounded up by Havana's security agents, she was the only woman. For telling the truth about her country, she was sentenced to a staggering 20 years' incarceration. She had been right about being under surveillance. The chief witness at her trial was an undercover security agent who had spied for more than a year on her every move: the assistant who had made us coffee.
In prison, Roque grew extremely ill. Repeated bouts of vomiting and diarrhea caused her to lose 30 pounds; her health declined so precipitously that the government released her early. Indomitable as ever, she immediately threw herself back into the fight to liberate Cuba.
Unlike countless other Cuban citizens who have fled for a better life in America and elsewhere, Roque will not consider going into exile. In announcing her International Women of Courage award, the State Department applauded Roque's fierce refusal to knuckle under government pressure. She "continued to advocate for human rights," it noted, "maintaining contact with political prisoners, documenting fraudulent court hearings, and providing material support to activists and their families."
In Cuba, as in all dictatorships, it is the dissenters who sustain hope and keep honor alive. The nation Roque loves still bleeds under its cruel communist oppressors. But those oppressors will not rule forever. One day, Cuba will be free. And then Cuban children will be taught the truth — that the Castro revolution brought evil and lies and suffering to the island, and that liberty and democracy eventually returned only because heroes like Martha Beatriz Roque refused to be cowed.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Fill out your bracket in this science March Madness
My email brings an announcement of the 2024 Science Clash Tournament, a public competition to crown the "Greatest Life-Saver of All Time." The tournament is sponsored by ScienceSaves, a program of the Center for Inquiry. It will make use of brackets and multiple rounds of public voting to decide which of 16 scientific, medical, or engineering innovations has done the most to extend or save human lives.
Since its founding in 1991 by the atheist philosopher Paul Kurtz, the Center for Inquiry has promoted science, challenged pseudoscience, and opposed religion. Of those three goals, the first two strike me as eminently worthy and the third as sadly misguided. Good religion is as necessary to a healthy and humane society as good science. As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks often observed, science is the search for explanation while religion is the search for meaning — and the world needs both. (Sack's brilliant 2011 book, "The Great Partnership," develops this theme with great wisdom and eloquence.)
Different perspectives on religion notwithstanding, I love the idea of this tournament. Arguable readers, cast your votes!
Of course there have been scores, perhaps hundreds, of crucial life-saving innovations in history and no competition could hope to incorporate them all. Still, it surprises me that the 16 contenders chosen for the ScienceSaves tournament don't include two 20th-century agricultural breakthroughs that are each credited with saving at least a billion lives. One was chemical fertilizers, which were invented in the 1910s and 1920s and sent crop yields soaring to previously unimaginable levels. The other was the extraordinary advance in grain breeding after World War II known as the "Green Revolution," which made food more abundant and affordable than it had ever been before.
 Two of the brackets in the "Greatest Life-Saver" tournament match vaccines against seatbelts and refrigeration against antimalarial drugs. |
That said, the 16 techniques and inventions that were chosen to compete in the tournament were great leaps forward in human lifesaving. Vaccines have saved a billion or more lives since Edward Jenner invented an inoculation against smallpox in 1796. The process of desalination, which makes seawater drinkable, originated at least as far back as ancient Greece but became viable on a large scale only in the 19th century. Sewer systems aren't romantic or glamorous, but by flushing away bodily waste from homes and businesses, they shield human beings from countless deadly diseases. Thermometers, which make it easy to measure body temperature and detect fever, proved an invaluable aid in the treatment of sickness. After millennia in which there was no way to reliably and affordably keep food cold and fresh, the invention of kitchen refrigeration in 1913 revolutionized the preparation, variety, and safety of foods. Another innovation from the 1910s, human blood transfusion, made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to survive the blood loss that would otherwise make many surgeries and injuries fatal.
There are 10 other lifesaving developments and discoveries in the tournament: seatbelts, pasteurization, anesthesia, antimalarial drugs, air conditioning, water chlorination, antiseptics, radiology, antibiotics, and renewable energy. (That last is a stretch. Non-carbon-based energy has not had any measurable impact in saving lives to date; even the tournament organizers acknowledge that any such effect will come in the future once renewables scale up.)
According to its press release, the goal of ScienceSaves is "to generate increased appreciation for the role of science in our everyday lives." As I study the tournament brackets and make my choices, what impresses me even more than the role of science is the transformative force of human ingenuity. Ours is the only species with the power to improve the world around us, to discover cures, to conceive innovations, to improve our habitat, to tame nature, and to extend lifespan. Each of the 16 contenders in the "Greatest Life-Saver" contest is a wonder and a glory. It is our great fortune to live in a world that has them. Humanity gets many things wrong, but the persistent search for lifesaving breakthroughs is one that we get very, very right.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
What Mitch McConnell didn't say
Mitch McConnell, the senior senator from Kentucky, announced last week that he would step down as Senate Republican leader in November, bringing to an end the longest run as a leader of either party in the Senate's history. He first became a senator in 1985 and reached the first rung on the leadership ladder, majority whip, in 2003. Now 82, McConnell is in his seventh term as a senator; it seems unlikely that he will run for an eighth.
His tenure as GOP leader has been complicated. He achieved some historic successes, such as passage of the first tax-code overhaul in 30 years. He made some historic blunders, such as protecting Donald Trump from a Senate impeachment conviction following the violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. And he engaged in bare-knuckles political combat for which his opponents will never forgive him, such as refusing to schedule a hearing on Merrick Garland's Supreme Court nomination.
McConnell was the most consequential Senate leader since Lyndon Johnson, and his tenure will keep historians busy for years. But for a two-sentence thumbnail sketch of McConnell's political qualities, it would be hard to improve on Peggy Noonan's formulation in The Wall Street Journal:
"As leader, McConnell was subtle, saw around corners, never lost his head, skillfully herded some highly unusual cats," she wrote. "He wasn't a visionary but kept in his mind the big picture and played a long game." That sounds right to me, though I would add as well that McConnell was a judicious and quiet adult in a Congress increasingly stuffed with tiresome and immature poseurs who excel primarily at making noise.
There will be plenty of time to sift and sort through the entirety of the McConnell era but for now I want to focus on a single quote, spoken long ago, that drove his Democratic foes bonkers.
The quote came in an interview with National Journal. "The single most important thing we want to achieve," McConnell said, "is for President Obama to be a one-term president." If you follow politics — especially if you're a Democratic loyalist — you almost certainly know that quote. But if you are like the vast majority of Democrats who quote it, you almost certainly have never seen those words in context.
McConnell's words have been invoked as evidence of the man's ruthless partisanship and confirmation that he was never willing to compromise with Obama. Democrats often claimed that McConnell issued that declaration of unbudging hostility as soon as Obama entered the White House.
Obama himself claimed as much.
"When I first came into office," he said in a "60 Minutes" interview shortly before his 2012 reelection, "the head of the Senate Republicans said, 'My No. 1 priority is making sure President Obama's a one-term president.' Now, after the election, either he will have succeeded in that goal or he will have failed at that goal."
Democratic Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois made the same point. Speaking in the Senate in the fall of 2012, he declared that "the senator from Kentucky . . . announced at the beginning, four years ago, exactly what his strategy would be. He said his No. 1 goal was to make sure that Barack Obama was a one-term president."
But Obama and Durbin were wrong. McConnell hadn't been speaking "at the beginning" or when Obama "first came into office." Obama was elected in 2008; McConnell's interview took place two years later. It was not a Day 1 declaration of total war against a new president. It was something quite different: a discussion of political realities on the eve of midterm elections in which Republicans were poised to win control of both houses of Congress.
In his interview with National Journal — a sober publication aimed at policy wonks and campaign analysts — McConnell was explaining that even with control of Congress, Republicans would not be able to advance their agenda as long as the White House was occupied by a president who could veto GOP legislation. So to achieve their biggest policy goals, Republicans would have to hold Obama to a single term by recapturing the White House in 2012. There was nothing incendiary about McConnell's comment; if anything, it was a statement of the obvious.
To anyone who reads the interview, it is perfectly obvious that McConnell wasn't drawing a line in the sand or emitting a war cry. He was discussing how things get done in Washington. Indeed, in his very next sentence — which of course is never quoted — McConnell told his interlocutor that if Obama would be "willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues," congressional Republicans would gladly "do business with him." A moment later he underscored the point: "I don't want the president to fail; I want him to change," McConnell said. "So, we'll see. The next move is going to be up to him."
I realize that none of this is likely to mitigate the bitterness many liberal partisans feel toward McConnell. But the attacks on the outgoing Republican leader for his "one-term" quote were always a low blow — sometimes a very low blow. His words neither meant what the angry critics claimed they meant, nor were they uttered when the critics said they were. Democrats had many substantive reasons to resent McConnell. This one was just a cheap shot.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Kazan's lifetime achievement," March 8, 1999:
The truth is that [Elia] Kazan was not detested for naming names. If he had identified members of the American Nazi Party, the left would have lionized him. If he had testified before a committee investigating the Klan, Hollywood would have cheered.
No: Kazan was loathed because he was anticommunist. That was his unforgivable sin. That was why he had to be showered with contempt. When he was called upon to choose sides in the great moral conflict of our time, Kazan came down against the totalitarians. For that he has been hated since 1952.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Last Line
"Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind may be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery." — Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (1994)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
-- ## --
Follow Jeff Jacoby on X (aka Twitter).
Discuss his columns on Facebook.
Want to read more? Sign up for "Arguable," Jeff Jacoby's free weekly email newsletter.