By Jay Nordlinger, NR managing editor.
National Review. April 26, 2001
5:15 p.m.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said something remarkable today. Questioned
by New York congressman Jose Serrano, a leftist and friend of Castro's Cuba, he
said, "He's done some good things for his people." The "he,"
of course, was the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. I find the secretary's words
alarming and repugnant, but they did provoke a memory.
The year was 1986 (or thereabouts), and the place was Harvard's Kennedy
School of Government. The speaker, at a student forum, was Armando Valladares,
the great Cuban dissident. He wrote a memoir called
Against
All Hope. Everything that is important to know vital
to know about Castro's rule on Cuba is in that book. Not for nothing is
the author known as "the Cuban Solzhenitsyn."
After Valladares's speech, the students came after him: Hadn't Castro "done
some good things for his people"? Hadn't he delivered universal health
care? Hadn't he brought about universal literacy? They echoed the standard
propaganda line, learned from their teachers, the New York Times, and so on.
Valladares gave an answer I will never forget. He said it gently, earnestly,
yearning for the students to understand. I will paraphrase it: Say all those
things are true. They're not, but just say they are. Can't you have those things
without torturing people? Can't you have them without wrongly imprisoning them?
Can't you have them without killing them? Without denying them rights? Without
forbidding them to speak freely, without forbidding them to worship, without
forbidding them to vote and have a normal political life and pursue their own
destinies, and so on? Why is material well-being not that Cuba has it, or
anything remotely like it but why is material well-being incompatible
with freedom? Or not even with freedom: with the absence of a stifling, horrid
dictatorship? Why?
I doubt that Valladares moved very many of those people. But every time I
hear the phrase "Castro has done some good things for his people," I
wince. Sure, Powell doesn't embrace and adore Castro, as Congressman Serrano
does, as Congressman Charlie Rangel does, as Congresswoman Maxine Waters does,
along with many others. But he should realize what he gives away when he repeats
those words.
I am haunted by something another congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart of
Florida said last year, or the year before. It came to me strongly the
other day, when the movie star Kevin Costner had a love session with Castro,
down in Havana. Diaz-Balart said, "For the life of me, I just don't know
how Castro can seem cute after forty years of torturing people."
I just don't know how. Fidel Castro has done nothing for "his people"
but immiserate, propagandize, exile, imprison, or kill them. |