Over the weekend, murderous dictator Fidel Castro died at the ripe old age of 90. It was a taste of long-delayed and insufficient justice for one of the worst human beings to inhabit the planet, but that did not stop lamentations from the left. President Barack Obama, who re-enshrined relations with the Cuban regime under the Castros, issued a statement welling up with tears: “We know that this moment fills Cubans – in Cuba and the United States – with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation…we offer condolences to Fidel Castro’s family.” Mass-murderer-worshipping former president Jimmy Carter mourned, “We remember fondly our visits with him in Cuba and his love of country.” Secretary of State John Kerry cried, “Over more than half a century, he played an outsized role in their lives, and he influenced the direction of regional, even global affairs.” Clinical idiot Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Castro “remarkable…a larger than life leader who served his people who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.” The New York Times called Castro “the fiery apostle of revolution” and headlined, “A REVOLUTIONARY WHO DEFIED THE US AND HELD CUBA IN HIS THRALL.”
Here are a few thoughts.
The Left Doesn’t Mind Communist Dictators. Castro was one of the most evil people of the 20th century. And the West has forgotten that because the American left treasures leftist evil. It’s why college students still wear T-shirts with mass Che on them. It’s why Americans take Hitler seriously, but make jokes about Stalin, who murdered far more human beings. Communism isn’t a horror, according to the left – all of its attendant horrors are just means pursued to justify a worthwhile end. The left has soft-sold communism since Stalin – Walter Duranty of The New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize after whitewashing Stalin’s genocidal starvation of his own people to demonstrate that communism worked. Castro was a low-rent Stalin, and the left is still soft-selling him. They worked so hard to soft-sell him (Ed Sullivan called him Cuba’s George Washington) that they covered up the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald had reached out to the Cubans before assassinating JFK, instead blaming American racism.
Castro Was Deeply Evil. Castro conspired with mass murderer Che Guevara to overthrow General Fulgencio Batista, then began a guerilla campaign resulting in his takeover of the island. He immediately exiled priests, destroyed religious schools, nationalized businesses, imprisoned and murdered his enemies (he had hundreds shot within months of entering Havana). Here was Che Guevara: “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create a pedagogy of the paredon (the execution wall).” Castro imprisoned more of his citizens by percentage than Hitler or Stalin. He asked the Soviet Union to nuke the United States during the Cuban missile crisis. Castro supported terrorist groups ranging from FARC in Colombia to Shining Path in Peru and the communist Sandanistas in Nicaragua. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled, many drowning in the ocean as they attempted to sail to Florida; at least 2 million Cubans fled Cuba between 1959 and 1992.
Communism Impoverished Cuba. Cuba was one of the richer nations in Latin America when Castro took over, with a per capita GDP of approximately $2,000. By 1999, per capita GDP in the nation was just $2,307. DiscoverTheNetworks.com explains, “the average daily wage for an agricultural worker in Cuban in 1958 was $3. The average daily wage in France at the time was $2.73….In 1958 Cuba had a higher standard of living than any Latin American country and half of Europe.” As The Wall Street Journal points out:
The Cuba that Castro inherited was developing but relatively prosperous. It ranked third in Latin America in doctors and dentists and daily calorie consumption per capita. Its infant-mortality rate was the lowest in the region and the 13th lowest in the world. Cubans were among the most literate Latins and had a vibrant civic life with private professional, commercial, religious and charitable organizations. Castro destroyed all that. He ruined agriculture by imposing collective farms, making Cuba dependent first on the Soviets and later on oil from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. In the past half century Cuba’s export growth has been less than Haiti’s, and now even doctors are scarce because so many are sent abroad to earn foreign currency. Hospitals lack sheets and aspirin. The average monthly income is $20 and government food rations are inadequate.
As for that fabled Cuban healthcare, it’s nonsense. It’s good for those who are willing to pay cash from abroad, and horrible for those living in Cuba. As Jay Nordlinger of National Review put it, “Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce…. Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves — there is no choice.” As for the infant mortality rate, it’s low because Cuba aborts kids who are in distress in the womb.
None of this will stop the left from praising Castro, because all excesses in the name of the collective are good. Castro, we will hear, just went a bit too far to tear down the system, but had the right idea.
This is why the left must be fought at every turn. From Castro to Chavez, from Stalin to Mao, the left has always supported the worst people on the planet, so long as they’re pledged to destroying individual liberty in the name of collective fairness.