A beautiful memory!

Florida, a hall of light.

An open lecture at the Catholic University of New Spain: Democracy and Peace, the trials of opposition in Albania, Venezuela, Cuba.

I thought I had come to speak.

I had come to listen.

Faces. Not screens.

Names. Not slogans.

Breath. Not protocol.

Before me sat the historic Cuban opposition, men and women who have carried time like iron on the bone since the days of Kennedy.

They did not narrate history.

They were its pulse.

To speak before them was not a speech.

It was entry, into a chapter that still breathes.

Hands, not myths.

Eyes that held prison like galaxies of silence.

Exile. Hunger. Betrayals. Battles lost and never surrendered.

Light, still.

Beside them, the Venezuelan opposition, proof that dictatorships change costumes, military green, socialist red, populist blue.

But the mask always reeks of the same dust.

There, I learned a simple law:

Opposition is not politics.

Opposition is conscience.

A daily refusal, stubborn, tender, relentless, to accept lie as reality, injustice as fate.

Democracy is not luxury.

Not gift.

It is breath wrestled from sacrifice.

It is the courage to say no when silence pays better.

Peace is not absence.

Peace is the price of courage.

An order where human dignity stands above all.

And then Albania entered, with its fatigue of transition, its temptations to hush, its habit of trading the Name for the favor.

Florida taught me:

Opposition is not merely an alternative government.

It is the moral memory of a nation.

The voice that keeps power from becoming absolute.

The breath that keeps hope alive, that democracy can be reborn even when it seems extinguished.

Like Cubans who never forgot their stolen Light.

Like Venezuelans who still fight for dawn.

So must we in Albania see opposition not as privilege but as duty, civic, moral, patriotic.

To oppose is not only to confront a cabinet.

It is to defend the dignity of the citizen.

To guard the spirit of the republic.

To build a culture where the human being is not a user of a system, but sovereign of his own future.

This night in Florida said it plain:

The struggle for freedom and democracy is universal.

And Albania, with all its wounds, its disillusions, cannot abandon it.

It must carry it forward, with more wisdom, more resolve, more faith, yes, but also with risk, with truth, with Names that do not sell.

Because even a simple citizen, even a great nobody, can hold an ember of a word that cannot be bought.

Light travels through ash.

Even ash remembers fire.

And that memory is enough.