Walesa

Lech Walesa is living legend. Leader of the dockworkers at the city of Gdansk during the eighties, he led unions in strikes forbidden by the decaying communist regime. Those wildcat actions eventually became the focal point of nationwide pro-democracy protests.

He did not expect to be a person of any importance. Because of the historical significance of the mass movements he led, however, Walesa was awarded the Nobel Prize. When the communist regime collapsed under pressure from its own citizens, the dockworker from Gdansk was handed the vital challenge of leading his country to democracy.

After serving his term as Poland’s president, Walesa quietly returned to Gdansk, relishing the life he loved: a unionist and patriot. The world, however, would not cease honoring an ordinary citizen who shaped history by sheer courage and compelling integrity.

In Walesa, we have the icon of the heroic Everyman. We watched the Solidarity movement in Poland intently as we waged our own struggle here against the dictatorship. With the blessings and support of the first Polish Pope, the much-loved John Paul II, Solidarity quickly grew into an unstoppable force. It was a movement of ordinary citizens animated by faith as much as by courage.

It is not true Filipinos invented people power. The Czechs like the Poles were at it, led by the playwright Vaclav Havel, when the Edsa Revolution happened. Havel, like Walesa, was chosen by his people to lead the new nation into a democratic transition.

The fate of the popular revolutions in eastern Europe were, however, contingent on a large external factor: the fate of the Soviet Union. Popular urban risings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia decades before were brutally suppressed by Soviet tanks. Extensive secret police apparatuses were installed to prevent those ill-fated risings from happening again.

This is why people like Havel and Walesa required great courage to lead movements of ordinary citizens demanding freedom. They are genuine heroes of the first caliber who touched a virtue at the core of their people’s collective soul to bring together the popular movements that ended entrenched tyrannies.

This is why, when fortune smiled and I received an invitation to dine with Walesa at the Fort Santiago courtyard Tuesday night, every other competing appointment was dropped. This was the rarest opportunity to meet the man in the flesh.

The evening was perfect and the setting was cool. Walesa was as charismatic as we imagined him to be. In an ill-fitting barong unable to accommodate his girth, he waded into the admiring crowd, embracing strangers like they were old friends. Through the language barrier, he managed banter. What impressed us most was his utter simplicity. Through all the accolades, he retained the air of an Everyman, a unionist and man of the people.

He was never someone to make pompous speeches from prepared text. His remarks were extemporaneous and to the point, asking us to dig deep into our faith to find the strength to surmount all the challenges of this time. No jokes about wheelchairs or anything like that. Only a sincere and dignified speech about values universally shared.

It was like breaking bread with a prophet. Here was a true leader and a genuine human being, one with the wisdom to distinguish between mere vanity and authentic greatness.

Endangered

Do not be misled by its name. Associated Anglo American Tobacco Corporation (AAATC) is a completely Filipino company engaged in the manufacture of tobacco products for 63 years now.

AAATC makes lower priced cigarettes along with a handful of smaller manufacturing companies surviving on the margins. It has been competing with the large multinational companies and imported products for years. Its future is not bright.

Blake Dy, vice-president of the company is not a happy man these days. He thinks the Drilon version of the sin tax bill constitutes a death sentence for his company and those like it, throwing out workers into the streets and bringing misery to the tobacco farmers they bought from for decades. He looks out on workers coming to his factory and worries about their fate.

In his view, the administration version of the bill favors imports and will likely encourage smuggling of tobacco products manufactured outside the pale of stringent safety regulations local producers are subject to. He recalls how it was in the ’60s, when the Philippines had among the highest taxes on tobacco in all of Asia. Smugglers ruled the roost and counterfeit cigarettes with cadmium and lead levels six times the level of regulated cigarettes flooded the local market.

In Dy’s assessment, multinationals like Phillip Morris and the Japan Tobacco Corporation will have no problem surviving the price shock the proposed excise tax schedule implies. It is the smaller domestic manufacturers likely to go under.

The most vulnerable products, says Dy, are the “native” cigarettes entirely using local tobacco, employing hundreds who pack the product by hand and patronized by the poorest consumers. Without the clout to influence the crafting of the excise tax measure, producers of “native” cigarettes will be hardest hit, bound to lose their market to “white” cigarettes. AAATC is preparing to close down its “native” cigarettes department by April next year. Already, the company stopped buying from Isabela growers to cut losses. Along with smaller manufacturers like La Suerte and Mighty, they are preparing for the worst.

The small domestic manufacturers are now endangered species, casualties of policies that completely ignored their concerns. They are players considered too small to matter by the movers and shakers of policy.