Word: czechoslovakia
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...Fidel Castro has rarely, if ever, faced: a dissident as hardheaded as he is. When Castro took power in 1959, Paya was the only kid in his Havana primary school who refused to become a Communist Youth member. In high school, after openly criticizing the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, he was sent to a labor camp for three years. Rather than escape to Miami in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, he stayed in Cuba to work for democratic reform. Now his doggedness has prompted one of Castro's most ironfisted crackdowns: scores of Paya's fellow dissidents have been arrested...
...office in its first seven weeks. But deep down, the Prague native remains the amateur paleontologist of his childhood. Today, he travels in time through his movies, and the fossils he excavates are buried in the Czech national psyche; the collision of rock 'n' roll and communism in 1950s Czechoslovakia in Big Beat, his debut feature. Czechs collaborating with Nazis in his Oscar-nominated Divided We Fall. As the protagonist of that movie, a Czech whose family hides a Jew, puts it: "You wouldn't believe what abnormal times do to normal people." "I like to explore national embarrassments," says...
When Cuban president Fidel Castro took power, in 1959, Oswaldo Payá was in primary school - the only kid in the entire school who refused to become a Communist Youth member. In high school, after openly criticizing the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Payá was sent to a Cuban labor camp for three years. Rather than escape to Miami in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, he stayed in Cuba to work for democratic reform. More than two decades later, his efforts are suffering a backlash - they moved Castro to launch his harshest crackdown ever. In the past few months...
...Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint, kept shouting that rhetorical question at the guards under his command. It was nearly 11 p.m., four hours since Jager heard the stunning news on TV: the East German Politburo, responding to weeks of peaceful demonstrations and a flood of refugees fleeing through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, had announced that all citizens could leave East Germany at any crossing "immediately." Suddenly Jager, 48, held in his hands the fate of thousands of people--as well as that of the Wall he had so faithfully watched over for all 28 years of its existence. His orders were to turn...
Czech Republic They became known as the "Cibulka lists" - some 200,000 names of alleged collaborators and officers of Czechoslovakia's communist-era secret police (StB) - named for Petr Cibulka, a former dissident turned free-lance StB hunter who published them a decade ago. Although the Czech government once forced Cibulka to stop posting them on his website, it's now putting its own version online. On March 20, the Czech Interior Ministry (www.mvcr.cz) will post names of some 100,000 alleged StB collaborators, as well as 9,000 organizations the communists spied on at home and abroad. An online...