Democracy

When President Bush suggests, as he did yesterday, that the Cuban people should rise up against their despotic leader, he conveniently ignores the fact that U.S. policy toward Cuba has done little to spur a revolt. Decades of isolation - and his administration's toughening of the policy - haven't lessened Fidel Castro's hold on power or diminished the influence of his brother Raul, now serving as the de facto president since Mr. Castro took ill a year ago. Indeed, the only Cubans who have benefited from U.S. policy are the thousands of refugees who are given a free pass to live here.

LUIS HERRERA CAMPINS, 82 Former president of Venezuela Former Venezuela President Luis Herrera Campins, part of a generation of political leaders who helped end a decade of dictatorship and usher in democracy in 1950s Venezuela, died Friday. A lawyer and a journalist, Mr. Herrera was jailed for four months in 1952 for pro-democracy political activism during the dictatorship of Gen. Marcos Perez Jimenez, and then expelled from the country. He returned from exile in Spain after the dictatorship fell in 1958 and went on to serve as a lawmaker and as president from 1979 to 1984.

For a few years in the 1980s and 1990s, the world was changing for the better and seemingly destined to keep doing so indefinitely. Back then, freedom resembled justice as described in the Bible - rolling down like waters. But in the last few years, various governments have managed to dam it up, and in some cases even reverse the flow. Between 1990 and 1997, the number of democracies in the world rose from 69 to 118, according to the human rights group Freedom House. In the past decade, though, the number has crept up by just five.

Remember Brooklyn -- Olney Theatre Center, 2001 Olney-Sandy Spring Road, is presenting Donald Margulies' Brooklyn Boy, a play about a newly successful writer returning to his roots, through Sunday. Tickets are available for tomorrow's matinee at 1:45 p.m. Michael Frayn's Democracy, a play about West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, is showing on the center's Mainstage, also through Sunday. Tickets are $25-$46, with discounts available for groups, senior citizens and students. 301- 924-3400, or www.olneytheatre.

Don't complain about American politics. The U.S. system may seem complex and unwieldy, with multiple candidates vying to win multiple caucuses and primaries - and endless debates, speeches and television advertisements. But American politics look simple compared with the chaotic situation half a world away, in the Middle East, where elections are a matter of life and death. Take Lebanon - a small country in a rough neighborhood. A political tug-of-war has left four members of parliament dead and a presidency that may or may not be filled before the end of the year.

WASHINGTON -- The court ruling transfixed this city but probably has been barely noticed elsewhere. It should be noticed. It touches the vitality of representative government.Last week, a federal appeals court ruled, 2-1, that some air quality standards promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency were so ill-defined and unprincipled that the EPA must have exceeded its powers in setting them. It must have because -- this is the dynamite in the court's decision -- Congress would have acted unconstitutionally if it had delegated such unfettered authority under the Clean Air Act.That is, if Congress intended the EPA to exercise almost uncircumscribed discretion, Congress made a mockery of the separation of powers by delegating essentially legislative powers to an executive branch agency.

BEIJING -- At a time when the majority of the world's nations hold democratic elections, the recent scenes here have seemed like footage from a Cold War newsreel.Behind closed doors and surrounded by police, Chinese courts sentenced three democracy advocates to double-digit prison terms last month for trying to form the first open opposition party. Judges also sent labor activist Zhang Shanguang to jail for 10 years because he spoke to the U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia about protesting farmers.

Goya is a painter for the ages, so each era has had to have its own Goya to admire for its own reasons. The Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Goya: Another Look," gives us a Goya for the '90s, which is to say Goya as decorative artist, entrepreneur, relentless social climber, media celebrity and (surprise!) art collector. This is not the whole Goya, of course. But perhaps it is, alas, the Goya we deserve.Other ages have admired Goya for different (and better) reasons. He has been recruited as a proto-Romantic, proto-Realist, proto-Modernist and -- given the triviality of the present moment -- no doubt will be tagged shortly as a proto-postmodernist, as if gypsies, bullfighting and flamenco ever could be encompassed by so vapid a formula.

ON A STREET corner in the sleepy provincial capital of Guanare, a man tries to explain Venezuela by using a fresh pastry. From the outside, "it looks big and filled with promise," he says, before biting off a corner. "But look inside. It's less than half-filled." He pokes at the creamy cheese filling. "We expect more."The man whom Venezuelans expect to supply the missing cheese and everything else a country could want is President Hugo Chavez. Since he took office after running as an independent in December's elections, Chavez has promised to break the stranglehold of Venezuela's corrupt two-party system.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Out of power and mostly out of sight, pro-Western politician Zoran Djindjic has not yet run out of ideas.Even as war rages overhead, the leader of this country's Democratic Party is seeking to keep his eyes on a future prize for Serbia -- democracy. And he's also engaged in what might be the toughest profession in town."It is my job to be a democratic politician in the Balkans," he said in a telephone interview.The West is giving war a chance to end Kosovo's crisis and transform Yugoslavia.

Demonstrations at Tiananmen 20 years ago grew out of a paradox that had been building in China since 1978, all through the era of rapid economic reform. To achieve its aims, the Chinese Communist Party wished to liberate people economically while continuing to constrain them politically. A version of this same tension persists today. Following the disastrous Cultural Revolution (1965-1970s), the party no longer could base its legitimacy on Maoist socialism. Marxist-Leninist ideology was virtually dead.

Tis the season of commencement speeches. At bigger schools we'll look for the celebrity speechmakers and listen for sound bites from the Bills - Clinton or Cosby - along with an assortment of CEOs and novelists and local politicians. Most of their talks inspire, but there has come to be an underlying message that links education, graduation and material success. In our excitement for the new grads, are we putting the emphasis in the wrong place? As we celebrate, we calculate the value of a high school or college degree: We compare tuition with the expected wages and future positions as if that's the transaction in full.

RAUL ALFONSIN, 82 Argentine leader marked return to democracy Former Argentine leader Raul Alfonsin, whose presidency has come to symbolize the return of democracy across Latin America from an era of military dictatorships, died Tuesday of lung cancer in Buenos Aires. The presidential inauguration of Mr. Alfonsin on Dec. 10, 1983, ended more than seven years of a repressive military regime that left at least 12,000 missing. He was elected after the nation's defeat in the 1982 war with Britain over the Falkland Islands.

LONDON - If history records a sudden surge in carbon emissions yesterday, it may be due to the collective exhalation of relief and joy by the hundreds of millions - perhaps billions - of people around the globe who watched, waited and prayed for Barack Obama to be elected president of the United States. In country after country, elation at Obama's win was palpable, the hunger for a change of American leadership as strong outside the United States as in it. And there was wonderment that, in the world's most powerful democracy, a man with African roots and the middle name Hussein, an upstart fighter who took on political heavyweights, could go on to capture the highest office in the land.

However it turns out, the current fighting between Russia and Georgia - the first major military offensive by Russia outside its borders since the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 - is likely to have long-term consequences for the United States. Georgia's independence and democracy deserve U.S. support in this crisis, and we should make that position clear. When we were in Romania a decade ago, Romanians would regularly tell us that the United States was naive about Russia. Then, Russia's economy was weak and its politics much more democratic and open than they are today.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - The elected president of Mauritania was ousted yesterday in a bloodless military coup that appeared to spell the end for the Arab nation's experiment in democracy. A council led by a military commander ousted President Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi and placed him and other government officials in the North African country under house arrest. There were no reports of gunfire or violence. But Arab news channels showed scenes of black-clad riot police firing tear gas and chasing after civilians in the streets of Nouakchott, the capital.

President Bush's vision of a new Middle East was a badly executed push to encourage democracy around the world. It never fully appreciated the need for democracy movements to be home-grown and vastly underestimated the suspicion generated by U.S. interest in promoting such movements. And yet Mr. Bush wasn't wrong about the genuine desire of people to live in a country governed by democratic principles. Democracy has a robust following, especially among non-Western democracies, according to a recent poll of 19 nations by WorldPublicOpinion.

LEOPOLDO CALVO SOTELO, 82 Former Spanish prime minister Former Prime Minister Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who presided during Spain's rocky transition from the fascist dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco to liberal democracy, died yesterday in Madrid. He was 82. Mr. Calvo Sotelo, Spain's second post-Franco prime minister, governed from February 1981 to December 1982 after predecessor Adolfo Suarez stepped down. During a vote to approve his premiership, a group of right-wing Civil Guards broke into parliament, fired shots into the ceiling and held lawmakers captive.

Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy On Being an American Citizen By Susan Griffin Trumpeter / 304 pages / $25 While she was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, Susan Griffin was placed on the FBI"s Security Index. Griffin was active in Slate, a precursor of the Free Speech Movement on campus, wrote movie reviews for The People's World, picketed Woolworth's in sympathy with sit-ins in the South and attended a few meetings of a class on Marxism. Her file got thicker when she marched down Market Street in a bathing suit to protest the embargo on Cuba and was crowned "Miss Right to Travel.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- Sixteen years ago, I tried to answer a perennial question about American politics: Does the United States look more like the country predicted by Thomas Jefferson or by his rival, Alexander Hamilton? Jefferson asserted that ordinary people with sufficient education and virtue can govern themselves wisely, that liberty is the natural desire of all mankind, and that the world's monarchs and dictators would ultimately be overthrown. Hamilton, on the other hand, claimed Jefferson's view was folly, based on wishful thinking, because human nature itself precludes the kind of wisdom necessary for self-government.