Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Update: The Picture


I am reading something else about "the speech" on CNN, and it catches my eye. She looks much as I did at her age, much as a thousand little Cubanitas. Her pain rises from the screen, radiates from the page. I want to cry for her. Too young to don emotional armor, not hardened by the blows we all experience, how does she make sense of it all? Or maybe she doesn't. Maybe despite being in the presence of a world leader who singles out her father, perhaps, (the caption doesn't identify her) she doesn't care about the pomp, the press. All she know is that her Papi, has been taken from her and that loss overwhelms everything else.
Update:
Thanks to Marc's tireless efforts to publicize the plight of prisoners of conscience, I can now identify the young girl. She is Melissa Gonzalez, the daughter of Jorge Luis Gonzalez Tanquero, the prisoner he is hightlighting this week. Read about him here.

3 comments:

Gusano said...

Crap, my armor and hardness were melted by your words and that picture. not so bad. there's still a Cuban heart underneath -they can make us cry and harden us-but NEVER that that way from us!

rsnlk said...

Gusano, I know how I felt about my father at her age. No one had to tell me what she was probably feeling. Yeah, my eyes misted up, too.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the hat tip.

Yours is a beautiful piece.