From the WSJ Opinion Archives
NOBEL WATCH
Oswaldo Payá, Freedom Fighter
A Cuban dissident should win the Nobel Peace Prize, but probably won't.
Tomorrow the Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce this year's Peace Prize winner. The odds are very poor that this august body will give it to Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá. He has spent his life fighting for Cubans' rights against Fidel Castro, which earned him the nomination but is unlikely to win him the award. After all, Mr. Castro may be a monster, but he is a left-wing monster who thumbs his nose at the U.S.
Which is too bad, any way you look at it. First off, not rewarding Mr. Payá wastes a golden opportunity to help the Cuban people liberate themselves. The prize would give 11 million Cubans--who can't express their opinions, can't read or write what they want, can't even leave their country, one of the last totalitarian dystopias left in the world--hope that the outside world is with them.
Second, Mr. Payá is more deserving of the prize than many past recipients. He's twice dared to turn in thousands of signatures from Cubans demanding a human rights referendum. This may sound like small stuff until one considers that for 40 years Castro and his henchmen have ruthlessly quashed any dissent.
"We're calling for peaceful change, and need international solidarity," Mr. Payá, a 51-year-old electrical engineer, told me in a phone interview as state security agents listened in (they encircle every aspect of his life). He said he didn't think he would get the prize--or that he deserved it. He describes the pacifism of the group he leads as a creed they are committed to living every day, not a posture adopted because it is fashionable.
Other candidates this year are of course also deserving, and some are much better known. Curiously, many of the frontline candidates made their mark fighting communism. (Of course, this should not be curious. Communism accounted for nearly all totalitarian oppression in the second half of the 20th century, and those who fought against it should be in line now for recognition.)
Pope John Paul II, teaching us as much about life as he approaches the twilight of his own as he did throughout his 25-year ministry, would be an excellent choice. In any other year, he of course would stand as poor a chance as Mr. Payá, for similar reasons. He is a religious leader, which means he runs around doing all that uncool moralizing.
But this year no less a figure than Stein Toennesson, director of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, who watches the Norwegian Nobel Committee very closely, told the Associated Press that he would give the prize to the pontiff: "The main reason is his outspoken opposition to the war in Iraq." This, supposedly, rests on the reading that a continuation of Saddam Hussein's rule would amount to peace for Iraqis.
Mr. Toennesson is not officially connected with the committee that awards the prize, but his thinking gives you a taste of the morals that prevail in these Oslo circles. Twenty-five years of fighting communism, materialism and any other ism that subjugates the human spirit wouldn't deserve the prize, but opposing a U.S. war to liberate Iraqis would. For all the wrong reasons, then, the pope may get the prize in perhaps the last year of his life.
Another excellent candidate would be former Czech president Vaclav Havel, a towering figure who carried out a peaceful revolution to liberate his land from communist oppression. Mr. Havel has important marks against him, though: he's a free-marketer who supported the U.S. effort to overthrow Saddam.
Of other candidates, about the best would be Afghan President Hamid Karzai, also said to be a nominee. Mr. Karzai is a brave, even heroic figure trying his best to restore his country to the status of poor developing country it enjoyed before the 1979 Soviet invasion. But he's U.S.-backed. Odds are no better than 10-1.
But not all the candidates are anticommunist figures. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is apparently a candidate, as is U2 lead singer Bono.
Now it is easy to poke fun at Bono. Too easy perhaps, which should make us cut against the grain. His tireless crusade on behalf of the world's famished deserves much credit. This is not Madonna suddenly discovering hungry children. Also, Bono may have opposed U.S. policy--in Central America, for example--but does not make a fetish of it. In Africa, he traveled with U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow. Whether Bono is deserving Peace Prize winner is another matter, however.
But it's hard to take seriously the candidacy of Mr. da Silva (Lula to everyone else, apparently). Supposedly he would get it because of his campaigning for "social justice" in Latin America. That is a code word for anticapitalism, and the Nobel Committee might as well award the prize directly to antiglobalization demonstrators. This, of course, means that Mr. da Silva enjoys very short odds.
The three men and two women, all Norwegians, who make up the committee could give it to someone else not mentioned here. Or they could punt, and not pick anyone. They have done so a few times in the prize's 102-year history, but not since 1972. (They should have in 1992 and 1994 when they chose, respectively, Rigoberta Menchú and Yasser Arafat.) But the committee members shouldn't reserve the prize this year. They should give it to Mr. Payá.
While awarding the prize to the pope or Mr. Havel would make Catholics or Czechs rightly proud, giving it to Mr. Payá would make a material difference to Cubans. It could very well have the direct consequence of starting the unraveling of the Castro dictatorship, which has always been reassured by the support it receives from leftists abroad.
As Mr. Payá explained to me, "The Cuban people feel forgotten, surrounded by a sea of lies." I asked him about the double standards of those leftists who attack right-wing dictatorship but coddle Castro (a happily shrinking group, though an active one still, which includes Brazil's president), and he responded, "Those leftists who support him should do a moral revision of their position."
"Here's what we say to the world: if you have differences with the United States, don't try to resolve them by burying Cuba in the absence of solidarity," he told me. "Don't look at Cuba through an ideological prism." His words of defiance were made all the more poignant by the knowledge that Castro's henchmen were listening in.
"Cuba today is governed by an oligarchy that is an oligarchy like any other, made up of millionaires. The rest of us are very poor, but it's worse because we can't even say we're poor, and many in the world don't even recognize it," he said.
Will the suffering of Cubans and the heroism of Mr. Payá and others who've fought that oligarchy be recognized this Friday? Unlikely. Perhaps last year's choice of Jimmy Carter (in an deliberate slap to the U.S. government) will make the committee lean toward Mr. Payá, though again for the wrong reasons, as Mr. Payá points out. Mr. Carter is a fan of the Cuban dissident, and supports his campaign.
Whether or not the Nobel recognizes him, a free Cuba--and hopefully the wider world--will one day honor him as a man who brought hope and confidence to a nation battered by tyranny.
Mr. Gonzalez is deputy editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
