Luis Aguilar Leon. Published Tuesday, June 13, 2000, in the
In the still twisting Cuban saga, there is no more contradictory aspect than watching the American left helping its hated capitalists to recover what they lost on the island in 1959. That moaning sound you hear is the Ghost of Leftism Past, which once fawned over Fidel Castro's revolution while
hailing the triumph of socialism. Today, the dictator is little more than a beggar for the Yankee dollar.
In a pathetic effort to perpetuate his power, anti-capitalist hero Castro now welcomes bankers and corporate heads, fetes former enemies and executes or imprisons his revolutionary comrades. Castro's vacuous rhetoric and Pyrrhic victory on Elián González can't hide the basic truth
of what he has become: a huckster for capitalism, amazingly still championed by the western Left.
For their part, many capitalists sincerely believe that lifting the U.S. embargo on Cuba will weaken Castro's dictatorship and initiate democratic reform. But others who preach this line really are attracted by Castro's promise to safeguard their investment with the hard fist of the regime.
After all, what surer profit is there than in a country where the people are dependent customers of the government, which guarantees that profit? Now the various faces of the Left are closing rank, no longer behind the exploited workers or hungry peasants, but behind a tyrant who has twice Stalin's
time in power and who has betrayed the basic tenets of socialism.
The very man who once proclaimed, ``The beaches belong to the people, and we never again will allow rich tourists to come and sully them,'' has evicted the public from those beaches and returned them -- with a large number of available women -- to foreign tourists. Is this the same Maximum
Leader who cried, ``Now is time for Washington to learn that neither its embassy, nor its dollars, nor its allies, mean anything to a revolution that has restored to its people all their natural resources, and whose struggle will not cease until . . . we erase forever the imperialistic capitalism
and oversee the triumph of socialism''?
DEFENDING A LIE
It may be that the fundamental cause of both Castro's failure and the Left's betrayal to its principles resides in the incurable schizophrenia that toppled communism in Europe. Old Leftists never stopped insisting that communism promoted freedom, even as they suppressed it. Forced to choose
between propaganda and the truth, they defended the lie. They denied Stalin's atrocities and affirmed that they had eliminated ``man's exploitation of man.'' No wonder their descendants think that aiding Castro advances socialism. That lie is all they have left.
Luis Aguilar Leon is a former opinion page editor of El Nuevo Herald.
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