Ambassador Speeches

Remarks by U.S. Ambassador Robert J. Callahan at Independence Day Celebration, United States Embassy, Managua

Monday July 06, 2009

Welcome and thank you for joining us to celebrate America’s 233rd anniversary as an independent nation. 

Before I talk about the reasons that Americans celebrate this day, I’d like to reflect briefly on my 10 months in this lovely country.  Like others who have come to Nicaragua, my wife and I have quickly grown fond of the people, their warmth, talents, generosity, and humor.  In our extensive travels throughout the country, we have also come to appreciate the diversity of the culture, the natural beauty of the landscapes, and the majesty of the lakes, oceans, and mountains.  For all that, and much more, not least of which is your love of baseball, we are in your debt.

I also want to reassure the Nicaraguan people of our commitment to them as partners and friends.  To state it succinctly, the United States seeks nothing more here than to encourage the consolidation of Nicaragua’s democracy and to promote the expansion of its economy.  To those ends, we maintain a large bilateral aid program, work through CAFTA to increase exports and create employment, and cooperate openly with many groups and organizations, without regard to political affiliation or ideology, to abet the development of a robust civil society, the single most important feature of a functioning and credible democracy.

Please be assured that our commitment to those goals is constant and unwavering.  In fact, as we meet here the American hospital ship Comfort is in Corinto.  During its visit, some 650 medical personnel representing 10 countries will see approximately 1,000 patients each day, or well over 10,000 in total.  The monetary value of this mission exceeds five million dollars.  As I said, that’s an example of our commitment to the Nicaraguan people.  
Now, a few words about why we Americans celebrate this day.

Americans have written many words, but none more compelling than these, among the very first, from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and the author of the Declaration of Independence, captured eloquently in that passage the sentiments that continue to guide the United States:  equality, freedom, individual rights, personal liberties, and that enigmatic but resonant phrase, “the pursuit of happiness.” 

When those first Americans professed a belief in liberty and proclaimed their independence from England, they took an enormous risk.  They knew that their lives and their fortunes were in imminent danger, and pledged their “sacred honor” to the cause of liberty.

They went to war and, against all odds, they won their independence and set about to establish a government.  In the founding document of the new republic, the Constitution, written just five years after the war’s conclusion, they wrote in the preamble that they intended to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

At the Gettysburg battlefield during the American Civil War, where he had traveled to pay homage to the slain soldiers, Abraham Lincoln spoke of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  In the last century, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Kennedy brothers, and many others used rhetoric to define America’s values and call on its people to live up to their ideals.  And in his inaugural address in January of this year, President Barack Obama said that the American people had “remained faithful to the ideals of our forebearers, and true to our founding documents.” 

So it is and has been.  But it has been a struggle, so divisive during the Civil War, for example, that it pitted state against state and turned brother against brother.  At other times, so fierce and full of ugly passions that it threatened to rent the nation’s very social fabric.

Somehow, through these many crucibles, America has emerged stronger.  Over time, Americans have come ever closer to living the noble ideals expressed by those first Americans.  Today, less than 150 years after the abolition of slavery, our president is the son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from the American heartland.  Our vice-president is the child of an Irish-Catholic middle-class family from Pennsylvania.  Their cabinet includes men and women descended from Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics, including the daughter of a Nicaraguan immigrant, and Europeans of various creeds and national origins.  And the president’s Supreme Court nominee is the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants.

What, then, makes them Americans?  What unites them?  It is not race or religion, ethnicity or gender.  It is not geography or education or profession. 

Rather, it is belief, not blood, that unites them, unites all Americans.  It is a belief in those ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and those principles embodied in the Constitution -- a belief in individual rights, personal liberties, equal opportunity, rule of law, and democratic institutions.

It is a belief, at its most basic level, in the promise of America, in the idea of America.
Thank you for sharing with us this anniversary and for honoring us with your presence.