Jul 22
Honoring Captive Nations Week
On July 21, 2026, the Honorable Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who fled communism in Cuba as a child and became the first Hispanic woman elected to Congress in America, provided the keynote address at VOC’s Captive Nations Summit. Read her full remarks below.
Good afternoon. It is a pleasure to be with you as we commemorate Captive Nations Week here at the Victims of Communism Museum. As we celebrate America’s 250th birthday this month, it is appropriate that we contrast the blessings of liberty with the ugly fact that so many around the world remain captives of brutal regimes and totalitarian ideologies.
In 1959, the U.S. Congress authorized and requested the President of the United States of America to issue a proclamation designating the third week in July 1959 as “Captive Nations Week,” and “to issue a similar proclamation each year until such time as freedom and independence shall have been achieved for all the captive nations of the world.”
As a side note, the driving force for this was Ambassador Lev Dobriansky, a co-founder of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and father to my close friend, AMB Paula Dobriansky.
As a former member of Congress, allow me to read a few excerpts of Public Law 86-90 from 1959:
“Whereas the greatness of the United States is in large part attributable to its having been able, through the democratic process, to achieve a harmonious national unity of its people, even though they stem from the most diverse of racial, religious, and ethnic backgrounds; and
Whereas this harmonious unification of the diverse elements of our free society has led the people of the United States to possess a warm understanding and sympathy for the aspirations of peoples everywhere…
Whereas the enslavement of a substantial part of the world’s population by Communist imperialism makes a mockery of the idea of peaceful coexistence…
Whereas it is vital to the national security of the United States that the desire for liberty and independence on the part of the peoples of these conquered nations should be steadfastly kept alive…
Whereas it is fitting that we clearly manifest to such peoples through an appropriate and official means the historic fact that the people of the United States share with them their aspirations for the recovery of their freedom and independence…”
Inspiring words! I am proud that in 2026 we can look back and see that some of the seeds of the Captive Nations initiative have borne fruit. The Warsaw Pact and Eastern Bloc have disintegrated and many of those post-communist countries, such as Poland, the Baltic States, and others, are now free societies and among our closest allies.
Those generations who stood firm and ultimately won the Cold War against Soviet Communism, have handed to us a responsibility to stand against the next generation of communism in all of its forms, from legacy regimes such as in Eritrea, to Latin American communism, to the forced labor and repression of China’s ‘new socialism,’ to that most diabolical regime in North Korea.
Throughout my career I worked to support captive nations, writing or co-sponsoring legislation such as the Cuba Democracy Act (1992), the Iran Freedom Support Act (2006), the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act (2018), and the Venezuela Defense of Human Rights and Civil Society Extension Act (2016).
Finally, let me remind you that we cannot fight communism effectively abroad when there are those in the West, indeed in our own country, who justify and even glorify it. In a time when there are some in media, our schools and universities, and even in public office who justify the brutal statism and anti-Americanism of communism in some form, Captive Nations Week is call for determined vigilance and action.
To the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation: you continue to provide a vital service as you lead the fight against communism at home and abroad. Thank you! I look forward to hearing our speakers today and I look forward to the day when all communist regimes end up on the ash heap of history.
