By Carlos Eire
Saturday, November 26, 2016
One of the most brutal dictators in modern history has
just died. Oddly enough, some will mourn his passing, and many an obituary will
praise him. Millions of Cubans who have been waiting impatiently for this
moment for more than half a century will simply ponder his crimes and recall
the pain and suffering he caused.
Why this discrepancy? Because deceit was one of Fidel
Castro’s greatest talents, and gullibility is one of the world’s greatest
frailties. A genius at myth-making, Castro relied on the human thirst for myths
and heroes. His lies were beautiful, and so appealing. According to Castro and
to his propagandists, the so-called revolution was not about creating a repressive
totalitarian state and securing his rule as an absolute monarch, but rather
about eliminating illiteracy, poverty, racism, class differences and every
other ill known to humankind. This bold lie became believable, thanks largely
to Castro’s incessant boasting about free schools and medical care, which made
his myth of the benevolent utopian revolution irresistible to many of the
world’s poor.
Many intellectuals, journalists and educated people in
the First World fell for this myth, too — though they would have been among the
first to be jailed or killed by Castro in his own realm — and their assumptions
acquired an intensity similar to that of religious convictions. Pointing out to
such believers that Castro imprisoned, tortured and murdered thousands more of
his own people than any other Latin American dictator was usually futile. His
well-documented cruelty made little difference, even when acknowledged, for he
was judged according to some aberrant ethical code that defied logic.
This Kafkaesque moral disequilibrium had a touch of
magical realism, for sure, as outrageously implausible as anything that
Castro’s close friend Gabriel García Márquez could dream up. For instance, in
1998, around the same time that Chile’s ruler Augusto Pinochet was arrested in
London for his crimes against humanity, Cuba’s self-anointed “maximum leader”
visited Spain with ample fanfare, unmolested, even though his human rights
abuses dwarfed those of Pinochet.
Even worse, whenever Castro traveled abroad, many swooned
in his presence. In 1995, when he came to New York to speak at the United
Nations, many of the leading lights of that city jostled so intently for a
chance to meet with him at media mogul Mort Zuckerman’s triplex penthouse on
Fifth Avenue that Time magazine declared “Fidel Takes Manhattan!” Not to be
outdone, Newsweek called Castro “The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan.” None of the
American elites who hobnobbed with Castro that day seemed to care that he had
put nuclear weapons to their heads in 1962.
If this were a just world, 13 facts would be etched on
Castro’s tombstone and highlighted in every obituary, as bullet points — a
fitting metaphor for someone who used firing squads to murder thousands of his
own people.
● He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and
nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.
● He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied
himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.
● He was responsible for so many thousands of executions
and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.
● He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and
prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a
higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including
Stalin.
● He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial
killings.
● He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile,
and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while
fleeing from him in crude vessels.
● He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen,
strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.
● He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped
out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.
● He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate
religion.
● He censored all means of expression and communication.
● He established a fraudulent school system that provided
indoctrination rather than education, and created a two-tier health-care
system, with inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and superior care
for himself and his oligarchy, and then claimed that all his repressive
measures were absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these two
ostensibly “free” social welfare projects.
● He turned Cuba into a labyrinth of ruins and
established an apartheid society in which millions of foreign visitors enjoyed
rights and privileges forbidden to his people.
● He never apologized for any of his crimes and never
stood trial for them.
In sum, Fidel Castro was the spitting image of Big
Brother in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” So, adiós, Big Brother, king of all
Cuban nightmares. And may your successor, Little Brother, soon slide off the
bloody throne bequeathed to him.
No comments:
Post a Comment