Posted on 03/03/2008 6:17:30 AM PST by jdm
“I’d say the tragedy is the moral cowardice not doing anything about it and letting it happen. But otherwise...”
The spread of Castroism is not attributable so much to cowardice here, but to an apparent lack of vision within the people of South America themselves. Long have they tolerated tin-pot dictators because of a cultural disposition to being more comfortable with a strongman who gets things done.
They only thing that fluctuates is whether they are from the right or the left.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, I was among many who had hopes that democracy would have a chance to take root in Latin America. The need to subsidize authoritarian regimes was gone because there was no longer danger of the vacuum being filled by a Soviet/Cuban-backed “revolution.”
Now we are seeing that our neighbors to the south still prefer elitist juntas that promise to wield excessive power on their behalf to anything close to real democracy.
That is the real tragedy and thus they will continue to languish in poverty under thug regimes.
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