(Richard Cohen, Washington Post, April 8, 2003)
Just recently the government of Fidel Castro arrested about 80 dissidents and almost instantly brought them to trial -- if it can be called that. Foreign journalists and diplomats were excluded from the proceedings, in which 12 of the accused face life sentences. All of them are undoubtedly guilty of seeking greater freedom and on occasion meeting with visiting human rights activists. In Cuba, those are crimes.
Castro is probably relying on the fact that the United States is occupied elsewhere, and as usual, he needs scapegoats to blame for the dismal state of the Cuban economy. But he can rely also on the unswerving naivete and obtuseness of the American left, which consistently has managed to overlook what a goon he is. Instead, it concentrates on his willingness to meet with American intellectuals and chatter long into the night. He is, apparently, good company.
The story of Cuba's crackdown since the war with Iraq has been under-reported.
In its report on Cuba, Human Rights Watch came right to the point: "Over the last 40 years, Cuba has developed a highly effective machinery of repression." What that means is almost no civil liberties and a penal system as medieval and barbaric as any in the world. That system was accurately portrayed in the 2001 movie "Before Night Falls," which was based on the memoir of the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas. He had served time in Castro's jails for being a homosexual. Before killing himself, Arenas left a note: "There is only one person I hold responsible: Fidel Castro."
About the time that movie was released, I talked with someone who had just visited Castro as part of a Hollywood contingent. I had to listen once again to how erudite the Cuban dictator is and how, of course, he has established a first-class health system. No doubt Castro has read his Gabriel Garcia Marquez and no doubt he cares about medical treatment. But he also runs a regime a shade worse than China's, according to Freedom House.
Cohen is willing to give Castro credit for first class health care, but how can we even trust that. We only know that the health care is first class at the hospitals he allows people to see.
If my Hollywood friend was some sort of aberration, I would not have given him a second thought. But he is fairly typical of many American liberals. They seem to think that any regime targeted by the United States is, ipso facto, an innocent victim. Some of that sentiment once attached to the Soviet Union -- remember how the Cold War was the fault of an insensitive America? -- and more recently to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. From some of what was said from the left, you would think that the current war is really about oil or imperialism or revenge -- and not for a moment about the sort of regime Hussein runs.
Castro is a chic dictator. Steven Spielberg palled around with him recently. He seems to see no parallels between Castro's oppression and Hitler's. A Cuban-American graduate Student at NYU wrote a great letter to Spielberg about this inconsistency. The hordes of so-called humanitarians are more concerned that the United States uses the death penalty than 90 ninety miles from our border innocent human beings are living in slavery.
No comments:
Post a Comment