Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (54 page)

There is nothing in the history of the world that ever cheapened human life like our great war; next to that, the indiscriminate killing of men by the states.

My friend says a man must be proven guilty first. Does anybody know whether anybody is guilty? There is a great deal implied in that. For me to do something or for you to do something is one thing; for some other man to do something quite another. To know what one deserves, requires infinite study, which no one can give to it. No one can determine the condition of the brain that did the act. It is out of the question.

All people are products of two things, and two things only—their heredity and their environment. And they act in exact accord with the heredity which they took from all the past, and for which they are in no wise responsible, and the environment, which reaches out to the farthest limit of all life that can influence them. We all act from the same way. And it ought to teach us to be charitable and kindly and understanding of our fellowman.

Dressed in business suit and tie at a luncheon in the Fifth Avenue home of a prominent New York publisher, Cuba’s President Fidel Castro—permitted in the United States to attend a United Nations ceremony—spoke with charm and vivacity to the elite of the media world. One of the world’s few remaining totalitarian leaders said he understood the politics of the American embargo against his country because he had been a successful politician all his life, having first run for office in college.

An anti-Communist columnist (the anthologist) interrupted the flow of his talk with a question: “If you’re such a great politician, why have you been afraid to hold an election in Cuba for the past thirty-seven years?” Castro drew himself to military attention and icily replied: “I am not afraid, but we do not have presidential elections in our country.” He compared his own selection to that of the pope, elected by a ballot of cardinals.

At the time the following speech was made, Castro was an embryonic military-political leader. On July 26, 1953, his armed attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba had failed; 122 codefendants were tried in the Palace of Justice, but Castro’s trial took place in a small hospital in relative secrecy. His speech from the dock on October 16, 1953, little reported at the time, achieved the level of official scripture after his two-year incarceration, his release and sojourn in Mexico, his return to the Sierra Maestra mountains in Oriente province, and his toppling of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorial regime in 1959.

Though he would later be famous for his self-indulgent seven-hour harangues, the young Castro, a lawyer turned revolutionary, was able to keep his gift of passionate presentation within bounds. His speech to the
court is studded with terrifying images—“They crushed their testicles and they tore out their eyes. But no one yielded”—but he also can begin paragraphs, or new departures in a speech, with quietly declarative short sentences (“In every society there are men of base instincts”). He evokes the names of the heroes of his country; “the Apostle” referred to here is José Martí, the poet and Cuban patriot who led the struggle for independence from Spain in the last part of the nineteenth century. Marti lived for a time in New York City and was an occasional contributor to the
New York Sun
. The centennial of his birth in 1953 was overlooked in Cuba; Castro, who wished to associate himself with the revolutionary hero, made a point of it.

***

HONORABLE JUDGES: IF
there is in your hearts a vestige of love for your country, love for humanity, love for justice, listen carefully. I know that I will be silenced for many years; I know that the regime will try to suppress the truth by all possible means; I know that there will be a conspiracy to bury me in oblivion. But my voice will not be stilled—it will rise from my breast even when I feel most alone, and my heart will give it all the fire that callous cowards deny it….

From a shack in the mountains on Monday, July the twenty-seventh, I listened to the dictator’s voice on the air while there were still eighteen of our men in arms against the government. Those who have never experienced similar moments will never know that kind of bitterness and indignation. While the long cherished hopes of freeing our people lay in ruins about us we heard those crushed hopes gloated over by a tyrant more vicious, more arrogant, than ever. The endless stream of lies and slanders, poured forth in his crude, odious, repulsive language, may only be compared to the endless stream of clean young blood which had flowed since the previous night—with his knowledge, consent, complicity and approval—being spilled by the most inhuman gang of assassins it is possible to imagine.

To have believed him for a single moment would have sufficed to fill a man of conscience with remorse and shame for the rest of his life. At that time I could not even hope to brand his miserable forehead with the mark of truth, which condemns him for the rest of his days and for all time to come. Already a circle of more than a thousand men, armed with weapons more powerful than ours and with peremptory orders to bring in our bodies, was closing in around us….

Moncada Barracks were turned into a workshop of torture and death.
Some shameful individuals turned their uniforms into butchers’ aprons. The walls were splattered with blood. The bullets embedded in the walls were encrusted with singed bits of skin, brains and human hair, the grisly reminders of rifle shots fired full in the face. The grass around the barracks was dark and sticky with human blood. The criminal hands that are guiding the destiny of Cuba had written for the prisoners at the entrance of that den of death the very inscription of Hell: “Forsake all hope.”

They did not even attempt to cover appearances. They did not bother in the least to conceal what they were doing. They thought they had deceived the people with their lies and they ended up deceiving themselves. They felt themselves lords and masters of the universe, with power over life and death. So the fear they had experienced upon our attack at daybreak was dissipated in a feast of corpses, in a drunken orgy of blood….

Dante divided his
Inferno
into nine circles. He put the criminals in the seventh, the thieves in the eighth, and the traitors in the ninth. Difficult dilemma the devils will be faced with, when they try to find an adequate spot for this man’s soul—if this man has a soul. The man who instigated the atrocious acts in Santiago de Cuba doesn’t even have a heart.

In every society there are men of base instincts. The sadists, brutes, conveyors of all the ancestral atavisms go about in the guise of human beings, but they are monsters, only more or less restrained by discipline and social habit. If they are offered a drink from a river of blood, they will not be satisfied until they drink the river dry. All these men needed was the order. At their hands the best and noblest Cubans perished: the most valiant, the most honest, the most idealistic. The tyrant called them mercenaries. There they were dying as heroes at the hands of men who collect a salary from the republic and who, with the arms the republic gave them to defend her, serve the interests of a clique and murder her best citizens.

Throughout their torturing of our comrades, the army offered them the chance to save their lives by betraying their ideology and falsely declaring that Prío had given them money. When they indignantly rejected that proposition, the army continued with its horrible tortures. They crushed their testicles and they tore out their eyes. But no one yielded. No complaint was heard nor a favor asked. Even when they had been deprived of their virile organs, our men were still a thousand times more men than all their tormentors together. Photographs, which do not lie, show the bodies torn to pieces. Other methods were used. Frustrated by the valor of the men, they tried to break the spirit of our women. With a bleeding human eye in their hands, a sergeant and several other
men went to the cell where our comrades Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría were held. Addressing the latter, and showing her the eye, they said: “This eye belonged to your brother. If you will not tell us what he refused to say, we will tear out the other.” She, who loved her valiant brother above all things, replied full of dignity: “If you tore out an eye and he did not speak, much less will I.” Later they came back and burned their arms with lit cigarettes until at last, filled with spite, they told the young Haydée Santamaría: “You no longer have a fiancé because we have killed him too.” But, still imperturbable, she answered: “He is not dead, because to die for one’s country is to live forever.” Never had the heroism and the dignity of Cuban womanhood reached such heights….

We are Cubans and to be Cuban implies a duty; not to fulfill that duty is a crime, is treason. We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights. We were taught to venerate the glorious example of our heroes and martyrs. Céspedes, Agramonte, Maceo, Gómez, and Martí were the first names engraved in our minds. We were taught that the Titan once said that liberty is not begged for but won with the blade of a machete. We were taught that for the guidance of Cuba’s free citizens, the Apostle wrote in his book
The Golden Age
: “The man who abides by unjust laws and permits any man to trample and mistreat the country in which he was born is not an honourable man…. In the world there must be a certain degree of honour just as there must be a certain amount of light. When there are many men without honour, there are always others who bear in themselves the honour of many men. These are the men who rebel with great force against those who steal the people’s freedom, that is to say, against those who steal human honour itself. In those men thousands more are contained, an entire people is contained, human dignity is contained….” We were taught that the tenth of October and the twenty-fourth of February are glorious anniversaries of national rejoicing because they mark days on which Cubans rebelled against the yoke of infamous tyranny. We were taught to cherish and defend the beloved flag of the lone star, and to sing every afternoon the verses of our national anthem: “To live in chains is to live in disgrace and in opprobrium” and “To die for one’s homeland is to live forever!” All this we learned and will never forget, even though today in our land there is murder and prison for the men who practice the ideas taught to them since the cradle. We were born in a free country that our parents bequeathed to us and the island will sink into the sea before we consent to be slaves of anyone.

It seemed that the Apostle would die during his centennial. It seemed
that his memory would be extinguished forever. So great was the affront! But he is alive; he has not died. His people are rebellious. His people are worthy. His people are faithful to his memory. There are Cubans who have fallen defending his doctrines. There are young men who in magnificent selflessness came to die beside his tomb, giving their blood and their lives so that he could keep on living in the heart of his nation. Cuba, what would have become of you had you let your Apostle die?

I come to the close of my defense plea but I will not end it as lawyers usually do, asking that the accused be freed. I cannot ask freedom for myself while my comrades are already suffering in the ignominious prison of the Isle of Pines. Send me there to join them and to share their fate. It is understandable that honest men should be dead or in prison in a republic where the president is a criminal and a thief….

I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of seventy of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

An estimated 95 million television viewers watched the slow police chase of a Bronco vehicle that led to the arrest of a famous former football player and television personality. The 1995 criminal trial of Orenthal James Simpson for the murders of his wife, Nicole, and Ronald Goldman lasted 133 days, transfixing much of the nation and—through saturation coverage of the courtroom drama on live television—became a world event, often decried as a “media circus.”

One of the trial’s many dramatic moments came when the prosecution, led by Marcia Clark, demanded that the defendant try on the gloves worn by the killer. When O. J. Simpson had to struggle to get his fingers into them, that showed them to be too tight, and he delightedly exclaimed that they did not fit. (The prosecution lamely suggested that the gloves had shrunk after being bloodstained.) His lead attorney, Johnnie Cochran, then used a rhyming imperative repeatedly in his summation to the jury, equating the glove with all other anomalies in the prosecution’s case, charging a scandalous frame-up by publicity-driven police: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” He characterized the seemingly damning evidence alliteratively as “contaminated, compromised, and ultimately corrupted.” In his summation, Cochran repeated this theme, putting on a knit cap that was supposedly planned for use by his client: “It’s no disguise. It makes no sense. It doesn’t fit. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

The trial divided the nation along racial lines. Because Simpson, Cochran, and much of the jury were African-Americans, Cochran seemed to assume the role of a black preacher, especially in his rhyme and biblical citations. In a powerful summation, he began by quoting Frederick Douglass, the former slave who became a social reformer and the first black American political hero, on equal rights, which he said was of special interest “with a jury such as this.” He recalled that one of the detectives testifying for the prosecution, Mark Fuhrman, lied when he
claimed never to have used the word “nigger,” thereby imputing the motive of racism to a key prosecution witness. Cochran drove that point home by returning to Douglass near the end, “for there are still the Mark Fuhrmans in this world, in this country, who hate and are yet embraced by people in power…. But you and I… must continue to fight to expose hate and genocidal racism….”