Fidel Castro has been a prominent figure in my consciousness for as long as I — even I, now far advanced into my own dotage — can remember. He became the ruler of Cuba in 1959.
I’ve never understood why so many in the West found him cute, even inspirational. I’ve never understood the chic and closely related of Che Guevara. Fidel and Che created a murderous and oppressive tyranny that is still a blight on Cuba itself and that has been a generator of instability in the rest of Latin America and in Africa.
“Mass Murderer Dies, Mourned by Many”
I have no doubt that there’s great sorrow in many comfortably elite sectors of Hollywood, as well.
But there’s little sadness among Cuban exiles in Miami. I’ve been watching their celebrations on television. (I’ve been exceptionally aware of them for the past several years, now that I have a Havana-born daughter-in-law.)
“Ding, Dong, Fidel Castro is Dead!”
I don’t think that I’ve ever actually rejoiced at anybody’s death. I can’t quite forget that even the worst of my brothers and sisters are still my brothers and sisters. But some deaths don’t make me very sad, and this is one of them.
I just heard Xavier Suarez, a Cuban-born former mayor of Miami, say that, by his calculations, the Cuban émigré community in Florida has a “gross national product” larger than that of Cuba itself, which has a population that’s six times bigger. Castroite communism has been an economic disaster — which isn’t just a matter of frills and luxuries but of real suffering. And that’s to say nothing whatever about the wretched prisons, the mass executions, the enormous violations of basic human rights.
The Hollywood stars who are, no doubt, mourning Fidel are — to use Lenin’s terminology for such fools — “useful idiots.” Useful to very bad men.
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