Historians Have Absolved
Fidel Castro
Humberto Fontova. NewsMax,
August 15, 2006.
"You may pronounce me guilty,"
declared Adolf Hitler during the trial in
1924 for his failed Rathaus putsch, "but
the eternal court of history will absolve
me."
"Condemn me, it doesn't matter,"
declared Fidel Castro during the trial in
1953 for his failed Moncada putsch. "History
will absolve me."
The young Fidel Castro was a keen student
of Nazi pageantry, often seen around campus
with his well-thumbed copy of "Mein
Kampf" alongside his pistol. His title
of Lider Maximo perfectly mimics the German
term Fuhrer.
Over the years a varied assortment of foreign
fans and well-wishers have showered Castro
with accolades. "Cuba's Elvis!"
(Dan Rather.) "Castro is the most honest
and courageous politician I've ever met!
Viva Fidel!" (Jesse Jackson.) "If
you believe in freedom, justice and equality,
you have no choice but to support Fidel
Castro!" (Harry Belafonte.) "Castro
is a genius and Cuba is a Paradise!"
(Jack Nicholson) "The greatest hero
of the century!" (Norman Mailer) "One
helluva guy!" (Ted Turner.)
Sadly, lunacy on the subject of Fidel Castro
is hardly confined to the lunatic fringe.
"Castro has done good things for Cuba."
(Colin Powell.) "Castro threw out an
SOB and liberated Cuba's poor." (the
late Stephen Ambrose, America's best-selling
historian) A recent editorial on Castro's
legacy in the London Times, considered one
of the world's wisest and most respected
newspapers, gives the "mainstream,"
or even the respectably conservative, view
on Fidel Castro.
"Castro can look back on some unquestionable
achievements," starts the London Times
article. "For a start he has defied
the world's most powerful nation, just 90
miles from his shores, and lived to tell
the tale."
No discourse or screed about Castro - in
any language, from any medium, from any
point on the political compass - omits this
cliché. Let's look at this historical
record of "defiance."
"We put Castro in power," flatly
stated former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Earl
T. Smith during congressional testimony
in 1960. He was referring to the U.S. State
Department and CIA's role in aiding the
Castro rebels, also to the U.S. arms embargo
on Batista, also to the official U.S. order
that Batista vacate Cuba. Ambassador Smith
knew something about these events because
he had personally delivered the messages
to Batista.
Castro's "defiance" of the U.S.
at the time also involved his group pocketing
a check for $50,000 from the CIA operative
in Santiago, Robert Weicha. "Me and
my staff were all Fidelistas," boasted
Robert Reynolds, the CIA's Caribbean Desk
"specialist on the Cuban Revolution"
from 1957 to 1960.
After Batista fled and Castro grabbed power,
the U.S. abruptly changed diplomatic modes
all right: Never in history had we accorded
diplomatic recognition to a Latin American
regime as quickly as we recognized Castro's.
The U.S. gave Castro's regime its official
benediction more rapidly than it had recognized
Batista's in 1952, and lavished it with
$200 million in subsidies.
In August of 1959 the liberal U.S. ambassador
to Cuba, Philip Bonsal, alerted Castro to
a conspiracy against his regime by Cubans.
Thanks in part to Ambassador Bonsal's solicitude
for a regime then insulting his nation as
"a vulture preying on humanity"
and poised to steal $2 billion from U.S.
stockholders, the anti-Castro plot was foiled,
hundreds of the plotters were imprisoned
or executed, and the regime that three years
later came close to vaporizing many of America's
largest cities (including Bonsal's home)
with nuclear missiles survived.
"Nothing but refugee rumors"
was how JFK's national security adviser
and former Harvard dean McGeorge Bundy referred
to a report of Soviet Missiles in Cuba.
Cuban exiles were risking their lives to
obtain this intelligence. "Nothing
in Cuba poses a threat to the U.S.,"
he continued, barely masking his scorn at
those missile rumor-mongers." There's
no likelihood that the Soviets or Cubans
would try and install an offensive capability
in Cuba."
The cocksure Bundy was a guest on "Face
the Nation" while thus assuring the
American people. The date was October 14,
1962.
Exactly 48 hours later, U-2 photos sat
on JFK's desk, revealing those "refugee
rumors" sitting in Cuba, nuclear armed,
and pointed directly at Bundy and his entire
staff of sagacious Ivy League wizards.
But don't think for a second that the Best
and Brightest were knocked off balance.
No sir! The Camelot dream team set their
jaws, rolled up their sleeves, and met the
challenge head on.
"We ended up getting exactly what
we'd wanted all along," writes Nikita
Khrushchev about their bulldog bargaining.
"Security for Fidel Castro's regime
and American missiles removed from Turkey.
Until today the U.S. has complied with her
promise not to interfere with Castro and
not to allow anyone else to interfere with
Castro [italics mine]. After Kennedy's death,
his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us
that he would keep the promise not to invade
Cuba." Henry Kissinger, as Gerald Ford's
secretary of state, renewed the pledge.
After the Missile Crisis "resolution,"
Castro's "defiance" of the U.S.
took the form of the U.S. Coast Guard and
even the British navy (when some intrepid
exile freedom fighters moved their operation
to the Bahamas) shielding him from exile
attacks. Far from "defying" a
superpower, Castro hid behind the skirts
of two superpowers, plus the British Empire.
"[Castro] has some real accomplishments
to point to," claims the London Times.
"Under his rule, the impoverished Caribbean
island has created health and education
systems that would be the envy of far wealthier
nations ... and there is near full literacy
on the island." From London to Tokyo,
from Paris to Bangkok, from New York to
Madrid - this claim echoes through every
media mention of Castro.
For the record: In 1958, that "impoverished
Caribbean island" had a higher standard
of living than Ireland and Austria, almost
double Spain and Japan's per capita income,
more doctors and dentists per capita than
Britain, and lower infant mortality than
France and Germany - the 13th-lowest in
the world, in fact. Today, Cuba's infant-mortality
rate - despite the hemisphere's highest
abortion rate, which skews this figure downward
- is 24th from the top.
So, relative to the rest of the world,
Cuba's health care has worsened under Castro,
and a nation with a formerly massive influx
of European immigrants needs machine guns,
water cannons and tiger sharks to keep its
people from fleeing, while half-starved
Haitians a short 60 miles away turn up their
noses at any thought of emigrating to Cuba.
In 1958, 80 percent of Cubans were literate,
and Cuba spent the most per capita on public
education of any nation in Latin America.
During its war of independence near the
turn of the 20th century, Cuba was utterly
devastated, having lost a quarter of its
population. So, Cuba's achievements in national
prosperity, health, and education came practically
from scratch and in only slightly more time
than Castro's stint in power.
Can any sane person claim that given that
record - and given Cuba's expenditures on
public education - literacy would not have
been eradicated in a few short years? Better
still, Cubans today would be not just literate
but also educated, allowed to read George
Orwell and Thomas Jefferson along with the
arresting wisdom and sparkling prose of
Che Guevara. A specimen:
"To the extent that we achieve concrete
successes on a theoretical plane - or, vice
versa, to the extent that we draw theoretical
conclusions of a broad character on the
basis of our concrete research - we will
have made a valuable contribution to Marxism-Leninism,
and to the cause of humanity."
I quote "this intellectual, this most
complete human being of our time" (Jean-Paul
Sartre's description of Che Guevara) exactly.
Cuba's prisons aren't its only torture chambers.
With such reading assignments, Cuba's classrooms
amply qualify for an inspection by Amnesty
International.
Without Castro, Cuba's full literacy would
have come about probably as quickly - and
without firing squads, mass graves, and
a political incarceration rate higher than
Stalin's. Most countries in Latin America
with lower literacy rates than Cuba had
in 1958 have done just that.
"During the 1980s," continues
the Times editorial, "one could still
conceivably argue that Cuba's dictatorship
was preferable to its US-backed counterparts
in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua or El Salvador,
which went one step farther by murdering
thousands of their citizens."
Here one blinks, looks again - and gapes.
Forget for a second that none of those regimes
abolished private property, free travel,
free speech. None abolished free enterprise
and mandated food rations for its subjects.
None set up government snitch groups on
every city block. Forget that far from being
"US-backed counterparts," Pinochet's
Chile and Somoza's Nicaragua had economic
sanctions slapped on them by Jimmy Carter.
Forget the peripheral ignorance; let's look
at the central stupidity.
You long to believe otherwise, you grope
for an extenuation, you hope you misread
- but it's inescapable: The editorial staff
of the world's most prestigious newspaper
is unaware that Castro's regime killed people.
Yet Castro's murder tally is not difficult
to dig up. No need to consult the ravings
of some "crackpot" scandal sheet
in Miami. Simply open "The Black Book
of Communism," written by French scholars
and published in English by Harvard University
Press, neither an outpost of the vast right-wing
conspiracy nor of Miami maniacs. Here you'll
find a tally of 14,000 Castroite murders
by firing squad. "The facts and figures
are irrefutable. No one will any longer
be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty
about the criminal nature of Communism,"
wrote the New York Times (no less!) about
"The Black Book of Communism."
"[The Black Book of Communism's] cumulative
impact is overwhelming," said a review
in a prestigious newspaper named the London
Times! So, according to a scholarly work
that received gushy reviews in the London
Times itself, Castro's regime almost quintupled
the alleged murder rate of Pinochet's (3,000.)
And this refers only to Communist Cuba's
firing-squad murders.
The Cuba Archive project, headed by scholars
Maria Werlau and Armando Lago, put the death
toll from Castro's regime, including deaths
at sea and the desperate anti-Communist
insurgency of the early '60s, at 102,000.
This project has been lauded by everyone
from the Miami Herald (again, no right-wing
outpost) to the Wall Street Journal. The
mind reels at the Times' ignorance until
you recall that such ignorance is practically
universal on matters Cuban.
"Castro has clung on for so long in
part because the US has provided him with
so many propaganda weapons to rally Cubans
to his side," asserts the Times editorial.
For the record: A recent poll conducted
clandestinely in Cuba by Spanish pollsters
regarding the impact of the "U.S. blockade"
revealed that fewer than a third of the
respondents blamed the so-called "Yankee
blockade" for Cuba's ills, proof that
the Cuban people aren't nearly as stupid
as the scholars and reporters who continuously
parrot the London Times claim.
Finally, the Times article brings down
the hammer with another academic mantra:
"El Comandante has clung on through
nearly five decades of economic sanctions
and a US-sponsored invasion attempt."
For the record: While renewing the Kennedy-Khrushchev
pledge in 1975, Kissinger partly lifted
the embargo, allowing all foreign subsidiaries
of U.S. companies to trade with Cuba. Even
that avenue is now moot. U.S. companies
have recently done more than $1 billion
worth of direct business with Cuba. Currently,
the U.S is Cuba's biggest food supplier
and fourth-largest import partner.
And anyone familiar with the details of
the botched Bay of Pigs invasion knows that
referring to it as "US-sponsored"
truly debauches the definition of "sponsorship."
[For details about this incident, see "Operation
Cuban Freedom - NOT!"]
Now, had Richard Nixon won the 1960 presidential
election, "U.S. sponsored" would
fit (though we would see it named the "Trinidad
Invasion," based on the original -
and better - landing site). Better still,
no one would refer to it as an invasion
"attempt." Better even still,
some obscure and long-dead Latin American
bandit named Fidel Castro would merit less
encyclopedia space than Pancho Villa - and
no mention whatsoever in the London Times.
Humberto Fontova is the author of "Fidel:
Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant," a Conservative
Book Club Main Selection.
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