Why do they love Fidel?
Betsy's Page
It's always been somewhat of a mystery why so many on the left just loooooove their man in Havana. He's done everything that the left would seem to despise: jailing opponents, clamping down on freedom of the press, imprisoning librarians, stealing money from government, isolating and even jailing AIDS victims. Yet they still flock to praise and romanticize him. They wear Che Guevara T Shirts despite Che's record of rounding up and murdering opponents. As the Wall Street Journal writes today,
<<< Fidel has cultivated his status as a left-wing icon since taking power in 1959. Remarkably, the fact that he has extracted from his impoverished and oppressed people a personal fortune--Forbes magazine estimated it last year at over half a billion dollars for its World's Richest People list--has done little to dent his image as a man of the people. The standard apologetics for the sorry state of the Cuban economy begin from the premise that America, not socialism, is responsible for Cuba's travails. But Castro's personal financial success suggests that in fact substantial revenue is sluicing through the island. Even with the U.S. embargo in place, there's plenty of money to be made in Cuba. It's just that nearly all of it the income from exports of seafood, tobacco, sugar and nickel, not to mention Fidel's real-estate and pharmaceutical operations, goes to the ruling clique or to the military, bypassing the population. There are good reasons to question the embargo, but the notion that it is the source of all of Cuba's ills isn't one of them. >>>
All that Fidel has going for him really is his opposition to the United States. Deep down that seems to be what the left likes about him - that they can use their praise of him as a stick to beat up on this country and on capitalism. You would have thought that the battle between communism and capitalism was over and the victor was clear, but it seems that there are still some pockets here in the US where it rages on.
Reporters love to juxtapose his 47 years of rule in Cuba with how many presidents have come and gone since he first took power. Well, that is because he is a dictator who refuses to give up power while we are a democracy that has laws for when a leader leaves office. I wonder if the same people who are shouting about ending the Bush regime would have the same pleasure with living under a ruler who refused to leave power after 47 years and then planned to hand power over to his septuagenarian brother? Can they explain why people in the past 47 years have risked their very lives to flee the island but no one seems to be flocking to that Cuban paradise. Even they who praise Fidel and his wondrous health care system don't seem to fly there to settle down to live or to take advantage of those marvelous hospitals for themselves. As the WSJ says,
<<< Of course it may be no coincidence that most of the admiration all these years has been from afar. The idea of "Fidel" allows his leftish admirers from the comforts of free, mostly capitalist societies to imagine that someone out there is struggling to build a better, more egalitarian way of life--without any of them having to live amid the daily Cuban reality of grinding poverty and political intimidation. >>>
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