Mr. Shadid reports that protesters there have renamed part of the city's downtown Freedom Square.
On Monday, pro-government protesters marched on downtown Freedom Square, demanding repeat balloting in the minister's district.
Downtown represents freedom to be aroused without even the need to acknowledge what's really going on.
Downtown, the Freedom Center was clearly a political choice, unrelated to culture except in the broadest anthropological or memorial sense.
But from inside the small banks and credit unions that anchor the state's downtowns — like Freedom Bank, which just opened in April in a tidy brick building overlooking the Oradell Reservoir — the view is more placid, and shaded by a hint of I-told-you-so.
A few weeks ago Ganzeer was arrested for putting up "Mask of Freedom" stickers downtown.
Even the downtown office of the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, seems almost sleepy.
But even some downtown officials say the Freedom Museum has been the leading contender for some time.
Carl Weisbrod, the president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, said the Freedom Tower would be marketable to traditional downtown tenants like financial and law firms and new tenants like media companies and advertising agencies.
But there is cause for hope in the efforts to build a new downtown, particularly with the Freedom Tower, envisioned as the heart of a new World Trade Center.
On Monday, despite her anticipated return to Cuba and her opposition to the economic embargo, Ms. Sanchez will take the stage at the Freedom Tower downtown — a haven where hundreds of thousands of Cubans in the 1960s and 1970s were first processed as refugees and handed slabs of industrial cheese and Spam.
