We are in Debt to Oscar Biscet
The Miami Herald Friday, November 16, 2007
By FRANK CALZON
Why should the U.S. president award a medal to the author of a book written almost 50 years ago? Why give a medal to an economist who already has a Nobel Prize? And why is this nation’s highest honor given to a ”prisoner of conscience” in a small country ruled by political thugs?
Embedded in the name of the award is the answer to these questions. The award is the Medal of Freedom, and it goes to individuals — American and foreign — who are chosen for uncompromising dedication to this nation’s most fundamental principle: liberty.
Freedom is not a one-day value, or a value that belongs to any single era. It is transcendent value. Americans admire those who long ago fought for our freedom. Inherently they know that what others do in defense of liberty helps us even today. We are free because men and women under different skies in different times believed in freedom as ardently as we do today.
Ideal of freedom
That is why presidents, since John F. Kennedy who established the Medal of Freedom as a civilian award, have chosen as recipients individuals whose lives and deeds epitomize the ideal of freedom. Freedom finds its champions and defenders in many guises and many places, and the U.S. Medal of Freedom honors service to our national interests and security, world peace and cultural or scientific endeavors. Service to freedom is broadly defined. Perhaps the best way to understand why is to consider this year’s recipients:
Author Harper Lee’s great novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, clearly defined the character of America and its devotion to justice. She not only defined what this country stands for but also described the courage an individual must summon to stand up for justice, in this instance to challenge the racist prejudices of a majority. Her book shows us an eternal lesson.
Economist Gary S. Becker, who won his Nobel Prize in 1992, continues to study the ways people seek to maximize their personal advantages, applying economic rationales to decisions previously viewed as beyond the reach of economics. Demonstrating why and how people make the choices they do provides an understanding of the inherent need people have for freedom and the choices it permits. ”Enjoying freedom” leads us to strengthen the institutions that protect freedom.
President Bush recognized Gary Becker and Harper Lee as freedom’s teachers. Cuban physician Oscar Biscet, in quite a different guise, is another kind of teacher, one who teaches by example. For many years Biscet practiced medicine while also chronicling and informing the world about political and economic conditions in Cuba. He has been a witness to the world about Fidel Castro’s government. Because of what he has said and written, Biscet has been harassed, beaten and jailed. He has spent most of the last eight years in jail; in 2003, he was sentenced to 25 years in Cuba’s national prisons for ”posing a threat” to the government. Internationally, he is recognized as a political “prisoner of conscience.”
A truly free man
Biscet poses a threat to the Cuban government in the same way that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., two of Biscet’s heroes, were threats when they peacefully protested the inequitable and segregated regimes under which they lived and demanded change.
For many who are brave enough to label tyranny as such, the only means available to resist is to say No. Biscet symbolizes the many saying No to tyranny and Yes to freedom. These are people imprisoned and dying in countries that most of us will never visit. Still, they fight for all of us. Biscet is not living in freedom, but he is a free man, unlike his jailers.
We are in debt to Biscet and to the other men and women whom Bush recently honored with the Medal of Freedom for showing us that freedom matters, that it is democracy’s bread of life.
Frank Calzon is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C.
