Posted on 04/05/2003 12:30:59 AM PST by JohnHuang2
The seamy affair some Americans have with Fidel Castro and his island paradise might suffer a little love-loss this weekend. But don't hold your breath.
Despite vociferous foreign criticism, Castro's cronies began trying dozens of political dissidents late this week for subversion. According to the April 4 New York Times, as many as 80 people may be tried throughout the weekend for varying degrees of Fidel infidelity – i.e., disagreeing with how Ole Busywhiskers controls his little water-hemmed gulag.
Excluding the Far East dung dynasties, American universities and the careers of some U.S. congressmen, Cuba is just about the only living testament to the political misadventures of Marxism. For this reason, leftists have a soft spot in both head and heart for the place.
Castro is their boy. He's out there really doing it. The same way aspiring young capitalists think about Bill Gates and T.J. Rodgers, that's how pig-snout pinkos think about Castro – a man realizing his dreams, living the adventure.
But nurturing such affections in the human bosom requires a degree of soul-selling that makes less tyrannically inclined individuals puke on their shoes.
One of the principal freedoms heralded by the left is the right of protest and dissent – has been since before the days of Mother Jones and can be seen today in the form of rollicking mayhem on the streets of San Francisco. One of the clearest measures of a society's liberty is the freedom to stand up and say your leader is an ass without worrying about a government van pulling up 10 minutes later to drag you away.
Cuba suffers a dearth of such freedom.
In this latest grim harvest of Cuba's dissidents, 12 could get life imprisonment for crimes as heinous as advocating democracy. Independent journalist and magazine publisher Ricardo Gonzalez of Havana is one of them. Many like Gonzalez – journalists, political activists and even librarians – are imprisoned solely for expressing ideas counter to Castro's regime.
Hope is certainly a vain exercise. Said Bertha Antúnez, whose uncle is facing a 25 year sentence, "the accused are hostages of the government, and the sentences had been decided even before they were arrested."
When thinking of the media's Elian Gonzalez performance in 2000, the irony here is both sad and more savory than an illegal Cohiba.
American journalists – who live and die by the First Amendment – were some of the most critical of the effort to keep little Elian in the U.S., going out of their way to paint the home his mother died fleeing as just two notches shy of utopia.
It was the Bay of Shills. They touted Cuba's safe schools, free medical care and low crime ad nauseam.
NBC's Jim Avila boasted about the "Cuban good life" awaiting Elian upon his return – which, of course, included the kind of poverty considered worse than abject by American leftists when focusing on outposts of privation at home. In the U.S., they go hoarse and frothy, deriding Washington's callous disregard while yapping for a deluge of new welfare spending. But in Cuba, poverty far more grinding and debilitating is somehow just swell.
Dismissing the privation and completely ignoring the political and religious repression, people like Peter Jennings actually gave credence to the question of whether Elian would have "a better life" in the U.S. or Cuba. This most recent rash of oppression should answer the question.
Now three years on, the only way Elian's life won't totally stink is if he grows up either very quiet or loudly in favor of his taste for boot polish. Fighting the authoritarian structures of oppression in Cuba is the surest way to find oneself enjoying "paradise" from behind bars.
Is there any doubt why in the decade immediately following Castro's ascendancy in 1959 nearly a million people fled their homes? Castro is a fiend, his vision for Cuba a nightmare. Those people knew that.
The amazing thing is that so few defenders of the regime will fess up and admit the same, even despite the trials underway right now of more than six dozen dissidents who only want a freer life than Fidel will ever grant them. As long as they are not the ones living by the leave of the tyrant, leftist mouthpieces seem comfortable blowing Castro kisses from the U.S. shore; meanwhile, the people can go hang.
Perhaps love isn't a many-splendored thing, after all.
Excluding the Far East dung dynasties, American universities and the careers of some U.S. congressmen, Cuba is just about the only living testament to the political misadventures of Marxism.
The same way aspiring young capitalists think about Bill Gates and T.J. Rodgers, that's how pig-snout pinkos think about Castro – a man realizing his dreams, living the adventure.
As long as they are not the ones living by the leave of the tyrant, leftist mouthpieces seem comfortable blowing Castro kisses from the U.S. shore; meanwhile, the people can go hang. Perhaps love isn't a many-splendored thing, after all.
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