Posted on 11/26/2016 2:40:09 PM PST by jazusamo
In April 1959, when I was all of fifteen and a student at Scarsdale High, I made the trek with by buddies from the 'burbs to the city to see our new hero Fidel Castro speak in Central Park.
It's fifty-seven years ago now, but I still remember that night well. How could I forget? It was high drama the likes of which I had never seen, people streaming in from all over New York, klieg lights splayed across Sheep Meadow. The Daily News reported thirty-five thousand people squeezed into the park.
I couldn't get up that close, but close enough to see Fidel in his familiar beard and fatigues, gesticulating with his hand in the air, speaking in Spanish while the crowd around me, largely Dominicans, screamed "Viva! Viva!" and "Viva la revoluçion!" with a fervor not even given, later, the Beatles or the Stones. They wanted their country liberated, just as Castro had supposedly freed Cuba from the dastardly Batista.
I am loath to admit it now, but I remember shouting "Viva!"—though somewhat tentatively—myself. I didn't speak much Spanish then.
What I was watching, indeed participating in, was my generation being seduced. I didn't know it at the time. Almost no one did. But a mass seduction is what it was happening that would last to the present day, metaphorically and actually. It was an early version of the events of 1968.
Fidel was seducing all of us and he was seducing himself, convincing himself of his own importance, of his own greatness, a greatness and importance that led him to murder his old compadres Soviet-style, imprison gays, and impoverish his people for decades (although not himself—he ended up a billionaire) in a country that amounted to a giant jail for some bizarre and truly sick Marxist vision of the good.
Still, over the years, even with reports of what was happening, even while half of Cuba seemed to be fleeing to Florida, it was hard for my generation to escape his allure and that of his sadistic, legendary, glamorous, partner-in-crime, El Ché, Comandante Ernesto Guevara, subject of so many dishonest songs and movies.
That allure, although somewhat diminished, had continued for me up until 1979 when I visited Cuba as a delegate to the First Festival of the New Latin American Cinema and got to hobnob with the likes of Nobelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez—himself a pal of Fidel's, able to drive a swanky new Mercedes on an island filled with aging DeSotos and live in a posh finca while the proles, under surveillance by the secret police, subsisted in decaying coldwater flats with no plumbing. And with Régis Debray—the French "philosopher" who chronicled Ché's exploits in the Bolivian mountains and became the most famous journalist of "the revolution."
I should have been impressed. And maybe I was in a way, but not for long, because the truth was there in front of me—the reality of Cuba itself. It was—you could find no other words—a communist shithole.
After a week, I was desperate to get out, as were the mostly leftist filmmakers who were with me, one of them even a member of the sainted "Hollywood Ten." The problem was, getting out wasn't so easy. We were stuck for ten hours at Havana Airport waiting for our semi-illegal charter flight from Miami to be allowed to land. I don't have to tell you that I and the rest of the group were sweating—and not just from the humid weather. Suppose we had to spend the rest of our lives in the "Marxist paradise"?
Finally, our plane was allowed to land, due to a special dispensation from Raul Castro, Fidel's tyrant brother now in control of the island, and we departed. In some ways, I date the end of my romance with the left from that experience, although the seduction— call it the Seduction of Fidel—was not completely over for me. It took years fully to dwindle away, finally to be extinguished on September 11, 2001.
Needless to say, the Seduction of Fidel was never fully extinguished for the current president of the United States. Indeed, I suspect it still burns relatively brightly for Barack Obama.
We can see this in his statement on Castro's death. No mention of the despotism under which the Cuban people lived or their suffering. Obama refers instead to decades of "political differences," as if the brutal totalitarian oppression of the Cubans was merely a policy disagreement.
On the other hand, our president-elect Trump writes "Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights."
Tell it like it is, Donald. What a difference! What an improvement!
The author now admits he was seduced.
How dumb do you have to be in 1959 not to see 40 years of the great destruction of Marxism around the world?
The Venceramos Brigades. Knew a guy from Berkley that went down as a soft sort of leftist, returned as hard core commie, as diid many others.
The Venceramos Brigades remain active fomenters of revolution with strong ties to the BLM chumps.
As I recall the air cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion turned out to be much less than was expected and some of the invading force was attacked.
Very interesting. Left-wing families always produce left-wing children. They almost never turn. Liberals produce strange fruit.
“... when I was all of fifteen and a student at Scarsdale High ..”
If you didn’t know, Scarsdale is “Middle Earth” of LIB Westchester County, in the People’s Republic of New York.
(now also home to the Carpetbaggers up in Chappaqua)
Looking back now, one can see it as a Fountain of Evil. like lots of other wealthy suburbs in the Northeast.
What is it about a little economic security turning folks into Radical, Anti American Liberals?
Now that would be the screenplay to write.
The damage these mis-guided folks have caused is Yuuuge.
Don’t ever let it happen again America.
Well said. Trump will provide a short reprieve because without rewriting all grammar school through college textbooks, the intellectual leadership of this country will continue its speedy decline.
That’s a revelation to me that Roger Simon looked up to Fidel as a hero. Even more sad is the fact that it took him so long to finally come to his senses.
My sense always was that he had no ideals other then the desire to boss people around.
When you dig into any liberal no matter what they might say it always boils down to one thing, they want the power to make other people do what they say.
They all end up the same way, living like kings while they order the "little people" around. Every single time.
No exceptions.
Kennedy promised air support, then renigged. The prisoners were later freed by the USA paying Castro 500 “tractors” which I later learned were not tractors but bulldozers.
Same hard core indoctrination from the cradle as in the Soviet Union. That becomes one’s reality, their core belief system.
Why one still sees old Russians weeping openly for Stalin. Few escape the prison built in their minds.
He was held in ‘awe’ when he over threw Batista....he has been held in awe by the left forever
Never understood how we never invaded and got rid of him
after the breakup of the Soviet Union
We never did anything overtly whilst they were an USSR serfdom, afterwards, our presidents just ignored the whole thing......as they did so much else.
At the time no one could see yet Communism was a failure.
This was before the Berlin Wall and all the rest, still in the future.
A lot of people cut Communist leaders slack - given a little more time, a utopia of peace, justice, freedom, plenty and human brotherhood would be established on earth.
Ah, the passing fancies of youth. Time does a lot to cure one of it.
Fidel never told most of his followers he was a Soviet tool until it was too late.
The general feeling of the time was, the ideology was not bad, it was just perverted by a few rotten apples - get the right leaders and the perfect socialist society will emerge with a lot of hard work.
When things ran downhill, people began to see not even the leaders’ best efforts could improve the situation. The ideology didn’t work no matter how people tried hard to make it a reality.
At some point one had to say Communism isn’t the solution.
William Alexander Morgan
There were other American Mercenaries who fought with Castro But "Wild Bill" Morgan is thought to be the most colorful.
(It is said Morgan did the fightin'...Castro took all the credit)
To be fair, Castro said all the right things.
He even promised free elections.
The people fighting for him didn’t risk their lives to replace one dictator with another.
In the end, that’s exactly what happened.
To be fair, Castro said all the right things.
Yes, he surely did that, goldstategop.
He fooled many many people, not only in Cuba but here in the US.
Did Obama pass today?
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