"Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory. "
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

In 1960, a 23-year-old postal bank inspector, Armando Valladares, was thrown into prison for refusing to compromise his Catholicism and political beliefs in favor of the increasingly repressive Castro regime in Cuba. Valladares received his 30-year sentence as a "counter revolutionary" because he would not place the placard "If Fidel is a communist, then put me on the list. He's got the right idea." on his desk. Valladares told Castro's agents, who had demanded that he conform, that he did not support Castro's communism.

We are fighting for the right of the working people to association and for the dignity of human labour. We respect the dignity and the rights of every man and every nation. The path to a brighter future of the world leads through honest reconciliation of the conflicting interests and not through hatred and bloodshed. To follow that path means to enhance the moral power of the all-embracing idea of human solidarity.

I feel happy and proud that over the past few years this idea has been so closely connected with the name of my homeland.

In 1905, when Poland did not appear on the map of Europe, Henryk Sienkiewicz said when receiving the Nobel prize for literature: "She was pronounced dead - yet here is a proof that She lives on; She was declared incapable to think and to work - and here is proof to the contrary; She was pronounced defeated - and here is proof that She is victorious".

Today nobody claims that Poland is dead. But the words have acquired a new meaning. (Excerpt from 1983 Acceptance Speech for Nobel Peace Prize by Lech Walesa)

"When years ago, we were probably among the most "unfree" of the economies in the world. Estonian history has not been easy. In 1940 independent Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union. But we never gave up. We fought partisan war for nearly ten years and continued to resist in other ways. Along with mass deportations, Estonia lost one-third of its population as a result. We fought the Cold War together as brothers in arms with you, and we won it together. In 1991, the Empire of Evil ceased to exist."
- Mart Laar.

Playwright and author Vlaclav Havel was born in 1936 in Prague and was a leading intellectual proponent of human rights and the rights of prisoners under the post WWII Soviet communist system imposed on it in 1945. Havel's plays and articles, which celebrated the strength of Czech cultural life and its strong affinity for democratic concepts, helped lead to Czech President Alexander Dubcek's Prague Spring of 1968. This brief flowering of democratic sentiment was set back by the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in order to force the country back into acceptance of the Stalinist/communist political fold.