Singer Carole King, right, speaks with Cuban singer Carlos Varela, cantante cubano, in Havana Monday Feb. 11, 2002. King serenaded Fidel Castro with "You've Got a Friend" at a weekend dinner, and U.S. representatives from California shared wines from Napa and Sonoma, part of the latest effort to change U.S. policy toward Cuba. (AP Photo/Cristobal Herrera)
Jay Nordlinger: In Castro's salon-- Anyway, the Castro fools (or knaves) take the cake. The other day, a group of pols - including Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter - flew down to Havana for a big soirée with the dictator. They had in tow a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, Michael Smerconish, all wide-eyed and impressed. The column he produced is a classic in the genre of outrageous naïveté. It has given Cuban democracy and human-rights advocates heartache - but then, they're used to heartache. I single out Michael Smerconish and his column, not because they're unusual - deserving of special opprobrium - but because they're so typical, so representative.
American Women Meet With Castro-- ``It was certainly exciting to meet with him. He is a very charming and eloquent man,'' said Jeffords, who traveled here with the university's Center for Women and Democracy. Their visit ends Friday.
INVESTMENTS IN CUBA-- The more things change in Cuba, the more it remains the same. To dispel any doubts about it, Fidel Castro has made it very clear that he is not contemplating any meaningful economic or political change in Cuba for the next one hundred years. When CNN's Bernard Shaw interviewed the Cuban tyrant on October 22, 1995 he asked if he would retire in order to facilitate an economic recovery in Cuba, but he was adamant- he would not. When he questioned if he would allow another political party in Cuba, the dictator for life responded - not in one year, not in ten years, not even in 100 years. A Hitler's fan, Castro is more modest, he is foreseen only 100 years forward not 1,000 as his German homologue. Evidently Castro thinks he will break the record of Methuselah!
WHY THE DOUBLE STANDARD FOR CASTRO?--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.
Delighting in the Dictator--- In the late 1970s the American writer Sally Quinn returned from Cuba having found it an Isle of Eros. Said she of the country that then housed thousands of political prisoners in dirty cells and torture chambers, "an attitude of sexuality is as pervasive in Cuba as the presence of Fidel Castro. You can feel sex in the atmosphere." Former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern bounced around the Cuban countryside with Fidel in a jeep and survived to tell of it. Said he of a man who even then was sending arms and soldiers around the world to support Communist terror and oppose American policy, Fidel is "soft-spoken, shy, sensitive, sometimes witty….I frankly, liked him." And Senator Lowell Weicker, the Republican ever on the prowl for a presidential nomination, launched this line certain to illuminate his presidential qualifications. "Castro's been known to snow people but he didn't snow me," Weicker asseverated. He spoke of Fidel's "enormous intellect and idealism" -- yes, idealism! He questioned why the United States did not take Fidel's side, the side of progress.
When No One Cares--That most Americans cannot imagine what life is like in a Communist country. That they are easily bamboozled by a not-very-subtle puppet show staged by an experienced, but not especially sophisticated, Third World propaganda machine. That an energetic executive supported uncritically by the mass media, with a well-drilled party in Congress and a judiciary well-seeded with place-men, can do anything it pleases to American citizens and their liberties, under any flimsy pretext it can think up on the spur of the moment, without fear of sanction by either of the other separated powers. That our elites actually like Castro and his system and will go to any lengths to ingratiate themselves with him, regardless of the interests of their own nation, which they do not like half as much. And that penniless immigrants who work hard for decades to establish themselves as middle-class Americans are regarded with contempt and loathing by those same elites, especially when their vulgar, graceless striving is accompanied by signs of religious belief.
Who Cares About Cuba?--American celebrities who trot to Cuba almost never see the country in which Cubans have to live; they see a Potemkin Cuba, set up for visitors and off-limits to Cubans. Outright leftists from America have always journeyed to Havana, to use and be used: Robert Redford and Ed Asner, Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee (two congresswomen from California). Other pilgrims, however, are less malicious than they are trendy and naïve: Leonardo DiCaprio, Woody Harrelson, an assortment of pop musicians. A few years ago, the fashion models Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss had an audience with Castro. Campbell hailed the dictator as "a source of inspiration to the world." Castro complimented the ladies on their "spirituality." Jack Nicholson, too, had a high time in Cuba. He drank choice rum, smoke choice cigars, and buddied for three hours with Castro, afterward pronouncing Cuba "a paradise."
Such behavior may seem merely ridiculous, but it is not without its effect on dissidents. Valladares confirms the obvious: that it demoralizes them terribly. "It demoralizes not only the resistance inside Cuba, but all of us who have struggled for many years while we wait for the solidarity of those who believe in democracy." He may wait for that solidarity a long time. The likes of Naomi Campbell and Jack Nicholson, sadly, have far more influence on Americans than Armando Valladares ever could……
Back in the Reagan years, Jeane Kirkpatrick became a heroine in the Soviet Union for the simple act of naming names on the floor of the U.N.: naming the names of prisoners, citing their cases, inquiring after their fates. Later, in Moscow, she met Andrei Sakharov, who exclaimed, "Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski! I have so wanted to meet you and thank you in person. Your name is known in all the Gulag." And why was that? Because she had named those names, giving men and women in the cells a measure of hope. Kirkpatrick says now, "This much I have learned: It is very, very important to say the names, to speak them. It's important to go on taking account as one becomes aware of the prisoners and the torture they undergo. It's terribly important to talk about it, write about it, go on TV about it." A tyrannical regime depends on silence, darkness. "One of their goals is to make their opponents vanish. They want not only to imprison them, they want no one to have heard of them, no one to know who or where they are. So to just that extent, it's tremendously important that we pay attention."