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The original "Speak Truth to Powah" guy, the bearded, combat fatigue-wearing, cigar-chomping originator of Guerrilla-chic, is now as old and feeble as his cause: International socialism with a gun. It is on its last legs, and so is he.
Forgive me if I don’t adopt a reverential tone. Others will. Just wait and see. Forgive me if I don’t meet this development with the correct cocktail of respect and awe tinged by a vague sense of disapproval. Don’t worry. Others will. United States congressmen. The leaders of free nations in Europe. American media giants. Hollywood activistas. They will talk with poorly disguised admiration about a towering figure who thumbed his nose at the United States.
Thanks to Castro’s remarkable Madonna-like sense of marketing -- and our own cynicism in this difficult world -- it has always been too easy to overlook the thousands of political opponents imprisoned, tortured and killed; the hundreds of thousands who risked sharks, thirst and drowning at sea to escape his people’s island paradise; and the untold numbers who succumbed to wretched fates. Cuba had that great much ballyhooed national health system. Its peasants weren’t being oppressd by Yanqui imperialista multi-nationals anymore.
The history of the Cuban missile crisis, when Nikita Kruschev tried to gain leverage and instill fear by planting missiles 90 miles off our shores, only mentions Castro in passing as the puppet host. It is easy to overlook the fact that he too wanted to bring us to our knees.
Castro himself was always smart enough not to push it too far. Those were the bad years, when he had to make sure he wasn’t about to light up an exploding cigar, compliments of the CIA. But like his Venezuelan understudy, Hugo Chavez, Castro knew at the end of the day that the United States would tolerate a buffoon just offshore, as long as that buffoon, murderous though he may be, knew his place.
This is not to diminish Castro’s bloody accomplishments: the export of violent class warfare, with material support, throughout Central and South America and across the pond to Africa. Impressive for a people’s banana republic.
Yes, the economics of Marxism does not extend far beyond bananas, sugar and cigars. The class-free society dreamed by the socialist social engineers turned out to be a society where everyone, except billionaire Fidel and his family, was poor. Jules Crittenden will never be ready for Prime Time on the leftist news outlets, but his final take deserves consideration:
When the communist storyline has finally played itself out, I’m looking forward to the rebirth of a newly free Havana, once the gem of the Caribbean. Yes, there were suffering peasants in that Cuba, caught in a cycle of political upheaval, dictatorships, under the lordship of great families. Much as there are today. Do you imagine there were nearly so many or so desperately poor as there are now, or that they were flinging themselves by the thousands onto jury-rigged rafts to escape?
But my expectations for the new Havana are not high. We’ve seen from the experience of Russia, East Germany, Yugoslavia and Iraq, among others, that the removal of socialist tyrants and the deconstruction of republics of fear can be a traumatic process. The free Cubans who live in the United States and those who remained enslaved at home are very different people now. They have different understandings of how one lives, how one advances in life, the role of government, of what freedom is. As exuberant as they may be in their first moments of liberation, the Cubans are a stunted people now. He has done this to them.
And this is the tragedy as Castro -- allow us to hope -- lies dying. It is not that this monster of a man may soon breathe his last. It is the wreckage he has left behind him.
Ding Dong, the Monster's Dying. Or so hope most Cubans with an IQ over 100!
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