Posted on 04/29/2003 9:44:16 AM PDT by William Wallace
As soon as Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, I saw on television the firing squad execution of an array of political prisoners, which he ordered. He then began filling his brutal prisons with Cubans whose sole crime was a desire to breathe freedom after the Batista dictatorship -- only to find themselves in another totalitarian quicksand.
At one point, interviewing the already legendary Che Guevara -- an international Cuban revolutionary icon -- at the Cuban mission to the United Nations, I asked him if he could foresee, anytime in the future, free elections in Cuba. Crisply dressed in his military outfit, Guevara burst out laughing at my callow naivete.
Having interviewed Cubans who survived Castro's gulags, I have never understood or respected the parade of American entertainers, politicians and intellectuals who travel to Cuba to be entranced by this ruthless dictator who, for me, has all the charisma of a preening thug, akin to any killer on "The Sopranos."
These Castro-philes are among those who discredit liberalism because they're unable to recognize and be repelled by unbridled evil. Consider Steven Spielberg, who has developed impressive resources through his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to keep alive the horrifying presence of the Holocaust. Yet, as quoted in the April 11 Wall Street Journal, Spielberg described his audience with Castro last November as "the eight most important hours of my life."
Was Spielberg's life that barren until those gloriously transcendent hours with the chief warden of Cuba's prisons?
From time to time, I still think of Elian Gonzalez, so vivid a free spirit here until condemned by Janet Reno and Bill Clinton to a land where schoolteachers must keep a record of any signs of their charges' lessening fealty to the relentless light of their lives. I wish the American press would pay more attention to the ongoing lawsuit alleging that Doris Meissner -- head of Clinton's Immigration and Naturalization Service -- ordered the destruction of evidence that would have contradicted the Clinton administration's forcible removal of Elian to Castro's continuation of Stalinism. Judicial Watch in Washington has the information on that lawsuit.
In any case, the next batch of fawning celebrities and members of Congress who party with Castro, will try to evade the recent show trials of independent journalists, human rights advocates, poets and other dreamers of democracy who have been sentenced by Castro's kangaroo courts to punishments of up to 27 years. Britain's Economist magazine notes that "since many of the dissidents are aged between 50 and 60, in practical terms they are being put away for life."
One prisoner of conscience packed into the gulag is the internationally respected independent journalist Raul Rivero, director of Cuba Press agency, and a board member of the Inter American Press Association. In the Castro courtroom -- from which foreign journalists and diplomats were barred -- Rivero, suffering from phlebitis and other ailments, was sentenced to 20 years for being an independent journalist.
"This is so arbitrary for a man whose only crime is to write what he thinks," his wife, Blanca Reyes, said in an April 8 New York Times article. "What they found on him was a tape recorder, not a grenade."
The Clinton administration -- which has so much to answer to history for -- promoted "people-to-people" trips to Cuba, which have continued. The American tourists and the participants in educational and cultural exchanges will not be able to engage in person-to-person visits with Raul Rivero, and other Cubans whom the Castro "justice system" has turned into non-people. Not even such an eminence as Spielberg will be free to show Rivero videos of Holocaust survivors.
Spielberg, immersed in pre-production of his next film, was not available for comment on Castro's latest eradication of dissenters. But his representative, Andy Spahn of Dreamworks, told The Wall Street Journal that Castro had been "provoked" to order the crackdown, because the head of the American mission in Havana, James Cason, had been meeting -- can you imagine? -- with Cuban dissenters in their homes last February.
And if an American official had, however discreetly, been meeting with Jews in Berlin who still hoped that the world would come to their rescue -- if it only knew of the design for the Final Solution -- would that diplomat have exceeded his responsibilities to humankind by "provoking" Hitler?
HBO has wisely cancelled the May showing of Oliver Stone's Castro-admiring "Commandante." During production, says the Journal, Fidel was "given the power to stop filming at will."
The show would have been a fitting complement to HBO's "The Sopranos."
How about Ronald Reagan?
ROTFLMAO!!!!
We were beaten, demonized, arrested for standing on the side of a street carrying a sign, marginalized and called "Miami Mafia" by people like yourself.
Some ambitions we have!
The good news is that you should be able to do that with ease, you are standing side by side with him.
Double talk to cover yourself.
What you are truly saying is that the end justifies the means.
Oh sure, you're making up crap and talking about running my people over on the expressway, but I should take my emotions out of the discussion.
OK, that explains your typos but does your finger control your mind as well?
No.
I realize that my response makes no sense to you, but I guess you would have to have been a slave before you realize that you would give up your life, or the right to ever see your child again, just to know that he or she would grow up free. Instead of condeming them to a life of slavery to appease your own needs.
Tens of thousands of Cubans made those very decisions.
It houses it.
Is it as pathetic as those who use the memory of the Clinton administration to keep "political fires ablaze"?
How about the Civil War?
How about Waco?
Is it wrong to point to the past and say "this is what could happen"?
"I followed the whole fiasco in Florida with regards to this child and it was truely pathetic to watch these people blantently utilize this kid to further their anti-regime stance with regards to Cuba."
Like those self-serving Jews using the Holocaust to further their opposition to Nazism?
It was about freedom...but I truly believe you'll never get that point, because you don't want to get that point.
"How dare I disagree with the pro Elain crowd as if Elian was the Mother Mary herself."
Please take your emotions out of this discussion.
"I see!" said the blind man.
OK...
I am from Miami, and I am discussed with the Cuban people of the City. The whole deal with this kid was so drawn out and twisted, it made me i'll. The behavior of these people is pathetic. To stop traffic on 826 highway is inexcusable. I am glad I was not there to see it. I would have plowed right through them. God forbid I had a medical emergency or something serious to do, these cowards of political conviction should fight the fight they want and not smail for the cameras. It is sad what they did to that boy. However for the Record. P'ss on Clinton.
No one with a sound mind would say that.
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