Dealing With The Monster At Our Door, Fidel Castro
The Diplomad
Our apologies for the length of this posting. We will break it into two parts to make it a bit more readable.
On January 20, 2005, President Bush will mark four years as President and commence his second four-year term. Three weeks before that, January 1, 2005, Fidel Castro will mark 46 years as sole and absolute dictator of Cuba. During those 46 years, the U.S. has seen ten Presidents: Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, G. Bush, Clinton, and now G.W. Bush. The Diplomad makes this modest proposal for inclusion in President Bush's agenda for his second term: Ensure that the Castro regime (not just the old man himself -- nature might take care of that) is not around for the eleventh U.S. President.
For pure evil in the post WWII era, it is hard to match Fidel Castro Ruiz. He has ruled the Cuban people with a brutality unmatched in the Americas. We probably will never know how many tens-of-thousands, maybe hundreds-of-thousands of Cubans have died before his firing squads and in his torture chambers, or from beatings, starvation and overwork in his labor camps and prisons. We almost certainly will never know how many ordinary Cubans died from malnutrition, shoddy medical care, suicide, or in vain attempts to escape the island. Many more have died in his grandiose imperial adventures in Africa (at the service of the Soviets) and in Latin America, in pursuit of his megalomaniacal obsession to become the Simon Bolivar of the 20th century. The list of dead and imprisoned include most of his close associates; few of his companeros from Sierra Madre days escaped a visit to the firing squad or to prison.
Amazing but even to this day he has defenders in the salons, media, and universities of Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Harvard Square, and New York. You've heard it: Cuba was ruled by a nasty U.S.-supported dictator, Fulgencio Batista. The income disparities were tremendous, bad medical care and schooling for the poor and the tiny middle class. Prior to 1959, Cuba was the American whorehouse and plaything of mobsters. The Americans drove Castro to become a communist. Under Castro, Cuba now has a high rate of literacy, excellent medical services, etc. As we said, you've heard it before; if you want to hear it again, talk to an Ivy League Latin American studies professor, or a European or Canadian back from an ultra-cheap vacation package tour in Cuba.
The defenders of Castro are either dishonest leftist hacks, fools, lazy consumers of MSM reporting and university "analyses," or so blinded by anti-Americanism that they'll defend anybody who "stands up" to Uncle Sam -- or all of the above.
Let's start with the issue of when Castro became a Communist. Was it before he came to power or only after he was rejected by the Americans? Who cares? Why this question so consumes the defenders of Castro is totally beyond us. Castro was the inheritor of a virulent strain of anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism common (less so now) among certain educated elites in Latin America. It is a legacy of Spain and Spanish Catholicism. It started in Spain as hatred and resentment for the upstart Protestant England, and in Latin America morphed into hatred and resentment for the upstart Protestant USA. Castro got a double serving of the virus. His father was a Spanish veteran of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (we forget how old Castro is) who stayed on in Cuba. We can imagine what dinner conversations were like when the topic turned to the USA's economic, political and cultural omnipresence in pre-1959 Cuba. This household environment combined with Jesuit schooling would have turned just about anybody into a virulent anti-American. [Note: Castro's speeches in style, syntax and content are remarkably similar to the homilies of Spanish Jesuits; Castro is essentially a Spanish priest.] Communism in Latin America is a natural complement to this pre-existing intellectual and emotional strain of anti-Americanism, anti-Protestantism and anti-capitalism. Once in power, that Castro would throw in his lot with the Soviets is not surprising; they were the pre-eminent anti-USA power. Had Nazi Germany been around and victorious in 1959, we have no doubt Castro would have hitched up with Hitler.
Even if pre-1959 Cuba were twice as bad as Castro apologist claim, does that justify what Castro does today, nearly a half-century later? Does the fact that Batista had a less-than-pure love for democracy, justify torturing and executing persons who weren't even alive in 1959? Does that justify one-man rule for 46 years? How long will Cubans have to pay for hosting Meyer Lansky and his casinos? When will Cuba purge itself of the "sin" of Batista? Why is it that the Revolution continues to produce counter-revolutionaries who must be shot, imprisoned, or if lucky, exiled? The Cubans throwing themselves into the ocean in the hope of reaching Florida are overwhelmingly the young, born well after Castro's coming to power.
As it turns out, Castro's defenders distort the reality of pre-1959 Cuba. Forget the Hollywood-NY Times-CNN-Paris version of pre-Castro Cuba as a dusty, sleepy, and poor backwater. A little research [Note: The UN, for some reason, apparently no longer publishes these numbers] shows pre-Castro Cuba with social indicators ( also here) among the best in the Americas. It had a thriving middle class composed of doctors (more per capita than 1959 Holland or the UK) dentists, engineers, artists, academics, and entrepreneurs. It had one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the Americas; one of the longest life spans; and one of the highest levels of literacy. It came in second only to the US in per capita ownership of television sets, radios, telephones and cars. Did Cuba have political and social problems? Yes, absolutely. It had a chronic inability to establish a working democracy; rampant corruption; and relied heavily on sugar, remittances and tourism for foreign exchange. We note that after 46 years of Castro, Cuba still has not established a working democracy; suffers rampant corruption; and depends almost exclusively on sugar, remittances and tourism for foreign exchange. One thing, however, has changed: Cuban prostitutes no longer serve American businessmen and tourists; they serve European and Canadian businessmen and tourists.
Cuba's social and economic indicators since 1959 have fallen behind those of most other Latin American countries [Note: This despite that the Castro government plays games with the statistics.] Suffice to say that we remember hearing about the great Soviet medical and health system; as quickly became apparent after the fall of the Iron Curtain, those claims proved false. The same goes for Castro's Cuba, now a socio-economic basket case. The bottom line? After 46 years of "liberation" and "revolution" Cuba has moved backward. [Note: For those who seek more on the state of Castro's Cuba -- including a hilarious, but true, account of Castro's attempt to breed midget cattle and his disastrous insistence on a ten million tonne sugar harvest -- The Diplomad strongly recommends Carlos Alberto Montaner's superb Viaje al Corazon de Cuba; also available in English as Journey to the Heart of Cuba.]
Let's put aside for now the obscenities committed by Castro in Cuba, and do a little foreign policy history. Forget Osama and al-Qaeda; recall that it was Castro who nearly destroyed the United States. He proved genuinely mad during the Cuban missile crisis, the closest the USA has come to incineration, urging Khrushchev to "push the button." Castro from the beginning of his regime -- even BEFORE the CIA Bay of Pigs disaster -- had declared the USA and the rest of Latin America his enemies. He nationalized foreign investments in Cuba and, more seriously, launched a series of armed attacks on Latin American countries. Cuban guerrillas undertook failed attacks on Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela. In 1967, he shipped off the increasingly mad and restless Che Guevara (who took personal charge of the firing squads in the immediate wake of Castro's victory in Cuba and as Minister of Economy devastated Cuba) to invade Bolivia, spark an Indian-European race/class war, and then use Bolivia as a launching pad for an invasion of Guevara's home country of Argentina. In the early 1970's, he was a major ally of Chile's Marxist Allende and funneled weapons to leftist terror organizations in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. While the USA suffered under the incompetent Jimmy Carter, Cubans -- in Moynihan's immortal phrase -- became the "Gurkhas of the Soviet Empire," participating in wars in, among other places, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Angola. Castro was among the most slavish of the Soviet Union's supporters, backing their invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, and putting his intelligence and military machines at their service throughout the world.
During the 1960's, 70's, 80's, and part of the 90's Cuba served as a support and training base and R&R point for international terrorists, e.g., ETA, IRA, PLO, the Red Brigades, and Puerto Rican terrorists were among those who availed themselves of Castro's help. In the 80's and 90's, Castro and his brother, Minister of Defense Raul Castro, became involved in drug running, forming alliances with Colombian cartels. Castro, of course, during the 70's and 80's, played a major role -- along with the Soviets -- in fomenting anti-USA revolutions in Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, and Nicaragua.
With that as a lengthy prologue, we will in part II turn to our recommended actions by the USA to help put an end to this odious regime. |
