Hope dies last

by Alexander Dubček

Like my parents, I sought only the modest goal of a safe job and a small house where my wife and I could raise our children. But that, I think, was almost everybody's little dream, and for most people it still is ... When Alexander Dubcek died on November 1, 1992, people on all continents mourned the loss of a hero. While global leaders paid respect and homage to the man from 1968, the common people knew they had lost one of the strongest voices in the ongoing struggle to build democracy and autonomy for all smaller nations. It was Dubcek's ill-fated experiment in "socialism with a human face," known abroad as the Prague Spring, that destroyed most of the world's illusions about the Soviet system and his vindication in the Velvet Revolution of 1989 provided the new Czechoslovakia with a living democratic tradition. Alexander Dubcek was the son of two Slovak-American idealists.^ Born in the same village house as the founder of Slovak nationalism a century earlier, he was raised on a soc