Michael Lind, for United Press International. Friday, June
22, 2001. NewsMax.com
WASHINGTON - Today only a single dictatorship remains in the Western
Hemisphere: Cuba.
Thanks to communism, Cuba - once one of the wealthiest Caribbean countries -
is now one of its poorest. Cuban society is ruthlessly regimented by a police
state modeled on those of Stalin and Mao. Much of the Cuban population has been
forced to flee in successive expulsions since the 1960s.
The response proposed by American liberals? The United States should be
nicer to Fidel Castro. Today almost all liberal politicians, pundits and
journalists, joined by many in the American business community, claim that
ending U.S. economic sanctions on Cuba will promote political freedom and
ultimately democracy in Castro's bankrupt police state.
Curiously, the American left made the opposite claim in the 1980s, when it
backed the economic sanctions that played a role in ending apartheid in South
Africa. And few liberals show interest in easing sanctions on Saddam Hussein's
Iraq.
Will ending sanctions bring democracy to Cuba? Many European and Latin
American nations have been trading for years with Cuba without weakening
Castro's control, which, like any tyranny, bases its power on controlling the
police and the military, not the economy.
Why, then, would trade with the United States bring Castro down? Trade with
China has not weakened the grip on power of the Chinese communist party. Indeed,
foreign trade and investment may strengthen the power of dictatorships such as
Castro's and China's, by easing the economic pain that communist elites have
inflicted on their captive subjects. In any event, new infusions of cash are
likely to end up in the bank accounts of well-connected Cuban officials.
The illogic and inconsistency of the American left can be seen in the
equally disturbing double standard in the contrast between liberal perceptions
of the former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic and Castro.
Like Milosevic, Castro is a hard-line communist skilled at manipulating
nationalist sentiments. Just as Milosevic expelled ethnic Albanians from Kosovo,
so Castro has expelled tens of thousands of his enemies in successive waves from
Cuba. At least Milosevic's atrocities were limited to the Yugoslavian civil war,
while Castro sent Cuban mercenaries to promote Soviet imperial aims in Africa in
the 1970s and 1980s, while intervening in civil wars in Central America to
spread communist totalitarianism.
Yet none of the liberal hawks who loudly urged the United States to wage war
in Kosovo on behalf of its Albanian minority has proposed military action to
free the Cuban majority.
What about judicial action against Castro? The Western left applauded the
attempt by Spain to try Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes
against humanity. But don't wait for American liberals or leftists to propose
putting Castro on trial for the imprisonment, torture and execution of political
dissidents, homosexuals and even colleagues such as Maj. Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, a
potential political rival whom Castro put in front of a firing squad in 1989.
Why Do 'Liberals' Idealize Dictators?
Psychologists may be better able than political scientists to explain why
many American liberals idealize foreign dictatorships with institutions or
values that they find horrifying in milder forms in the United States. For some
reason, many American leftists who loathe the military are not troubled by the
fact that Castro appears in public only in a military uniform. American liberals
somehow manage to support gay rights in the United States while ignoring
Castro's vicious campaigns against homosexuality, which he has defined as a "bourgeois
perversion." American liberals fret about the FBI and Internet censorship,
while calling for the United States to befriend a regime where culture and
religion are rigidly controlled by the secret police.
American liberals opposed to the death penalty often discover charisma in
this Cuban caudillo who has frequently resorted to the firing squad to eliminate
his opponents. Liberals who mock the "family values" and law-and-order
rhetoric of the right, suddenly discovered the importance of family values and
law and order when applauding Janet Reno's seizure and deportation of Elian
Gonzalez to Cuba (where he is now being programmed like other Cuban children to
revere Castro and hate the United States).
As we saw during the Elian incident, liberals who would be offended by
stereotypes about Mexicans or Haitians feel free to smear Cuban-Americans as a
group. Last but not least, many liberals who want to stamp out sexism and
smoking in their own country find themselves titillated by a macho despot whose
characteristic prop is a phallic cigar.
Can anyone seriously doubt that, if Castro were a right-wing military
dictator rather than a self-described socialist, American liberals would be
demanding internationally supervised free elections in Cuba, calling for tighter
sanctions to bring down the regime, and perhaps even demanding an international
invasion to free the Cuban people?
Unfortunately, from the Bolshevik coup d'etat in Russia in 1917 until the
present, all too many liberals and leftists in the United States and Europe have
been willing to excuse murderous dictators such as Castro who have used the
magic word "socialism" to describe their despotic rule. Even now, some
gullible liberals still excuse Castro's vicious autocracy by falling for the
regime's propaganda about universal literacy and free health care. (As was the
case in the Soviet Union and East Germany, the glowing official reports about
Cuban schools and hospitals will almost certainly turn out to be lies).
Few on the American left anymore defend Lenin, Stalin or Mao, who between
them starved or executed almost a hundred million of their own people in the
20th century. But their murderous disciple Fidel Castro can still inspire a
flutter in the hearts of many American liberals who are willing to withdraw
their objections to tyranny when the tyrant claims to be on the left.
Michael Lind is a senior fellow at the New American Foundation, an
independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy institute. He has written for
many major magazines and newspapers and has published three books of political
journalism and history: "The Next American Nation" (1995), "Up
From Conservatism" (1996), and "Vietnam" (1999).
Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights
reserved.
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