Don Pesci: The Castros' useful idiots

Hillare Belloc’s “Advice to the Rich” was lost on the Castro brothers: “Get to know something about the internal combustion engine, and remember – soon, you will die.”

Fidel Castro, Cuba’s deathless tyrant, died Nov. 25 full of years and a very rich man, his foreign bank account stuffed with other people’s money, though one would never guess it reading Jesse Jackson’s encomium.

The Washington Examiner noted, shortly after Fidel’s passing, that Jesse Jackson, “the civil rights leader, urged the nation to join ‘oppressed people’ across the globe in celebration of ‘the life of a liberator who fought and won against the rich and oligarch rule of [former Cuban President Fulgencio] Batista.’"

For as long as the Castro brothers ruled Cuba with a mailed fist, there were only two one-percenters in the island nation, both named Castro. Fidel lives on, one supposes, in his estate; Raul just lives on, waiting for the grim reaper to carry him off.  In Cuba, the poor people – the Castro brothers must have loved them, because they made so many of them -- were afraid to speak Fidel's name in the street, not without reason. When referring to the "freedom fighter," they pointed to their chins, indicating Fidel's beard. Fidel began his life as dictator of Cuba by lying to then President Dwight Eisenhower – “no, I'm not a communist’’ -- and ended it by lying to himself and Jesse Jackson, who is still credulous enough to believe the lies. The problem with Jackson – and others inextricably entangled in their own past leftist commitments -- is that Mr. Jackson’s own unexamined past lies over his eyes like thick cataracts. He cannot see the political idol behind the veil.

“The idols of the nations are but silver and gold,” says the psalmist, “the work of man's hands. They have mouths, but they do not speak; they have eyes, but they do not see; they have ears, but they do not hear, nor is there any breath at all in their mouths…”

The bloody 20th Century replaced religious idols with political idols, such asvMussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, Kim Il-sung in North Korea and the Castro brothers in Cuba. There was breath enough in their mouths to bury the tender shoot of democracy beneath mounds of lies. And all of them met and crushed by violent means courageous resistance in their own lands.

The brothers Castro knew well how to deal with the resistance. Their tutors were the atheistic communist idols of the political market place – Marx, Lenin and Stalin, each of whom made use of doctrinal enforcers. The Castro brothers' chief enforcer was Che Guevara, a murderer and thug whose somber bereted image appears today on the tees and sweatshirts of Ivy League radicals here in the United States.

In addition, the Castro brothers made full use of Lenin’s “terror,” and Stalin’s Lubyanka, the seat of Communist oppression in Russia. Once an insurance company, the Lubyanka became the headquarters of Stalin’s secret police, the Cheka. Irreverent Russians jokingly called it “the tallest building in Moscow,” since Siberia, the Gulag labor camp system, could be seen from its basement.

There were lots of secret police basements in Cuba, all put to good use by Cuba’s “civil rights leader.”

Cuba could not have survived so many years of Castro’s attentions without patrons and leftist useful idiots in the so called Free World. Just now, Raul, the surviving Castro, is in need of yet another patron.  Nikita Khrushchev began moving away from Fidel after he had suggested a nuclear strike as an answer to U.S. aggression against Cuba. Even then Cuba was a patron sponge. Another patron, the worshipful Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, later took up the slack. Under the strains of Castro styled socialism, the economy of Venezuela collapsed, and the country’s current socialist caudillo, Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver, has been unable to keep Venezuela’s grocery store shelves stocked with toilet paper, not to mention food.

Enter President Obama who, with his phone and pen, opened Cuba to American tourism. Alas, U.S. presidents come and go, unlike communist dictators such as Fidel, lauded by Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “Cuba’s longest serving President… a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century… A legendary revolutionary and orator… While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.’”

During the beloved comandante’s reign of terror, a million Cubans fled into exile. Not all of them made it to freedom. On July 13, 1994, during the infamous Tugboat Massacre, Castro’s brown shirts killed 37 would-be escapees, most of them children and their mothers. Juanita Castro who fought alongside her brothers against the Batista regime, also was a defector: “I could not remain indifferent to what is happening in my country. My brothers Fidel and Raúl have made it an enormous prison surrounded by water,” she said. Someone should tell Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Jackson.

It is easy to understand the Castro brothers: They cared nothing about the internal combustion engines of the human spirit and, like most moral monsters, they thought they would live forever. But understanding the useful idiots has always involved a ticklish moral hazard: How is it possible for “civil rights leaders” and democracy defenders to bestow compliments upon civil rights offenders and democracy destroyers? 

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political writer.

Chris Powell: The U.S. created Castro's dictatorship; Hampshire College's anti-Americanism

For practical purposes Fidel Castro died a decade ago as he bequeathed his dictatorship to his brother and slipped into decrepitude. For practical purposes Cuba itself died 25 years ago upon the collapse of its financial patron, the Soviet Union. The country remains impoverished and totalitarian.

But the cheering throughout the United States, particularly from Little Havana in Miami and the right-wingers in Washington, is hypocritical. For the United States created Castro with its decades of military intervention in Cuba and then its support of his predecessor as dictator, Col. Fulgencio Batista, who overthrew Cuba's elected government in a military coup in 1952.

Indeed, there is hardly a country in the Americas that hasn't been invaded, occupied, or controlled or exploited economically by the United States in the last century and a half, even as we presume to lecture them about freedom. The Monroe Doctrine's principle of keeping European powers out of the Western Hemisphere has been one thing. It has been something else to make the hemisphere safe for the United Fruit Co. and its successors.

As in Cuba, U.S. support of oppressive regimes in the name of containing communism has led to tyrannical pushback. In Iran the shah begot the ayatollahs. In Nicaragua the Somoza regime begot the Sandinistas. In Libya King Idris begot Moammar Gadhafi.

But our intervention in Cuba has been more extreme than anywhere else. Even today the United States continues an economic embargo against the country, though President Obama has loosened it by executive action. Federal law prohibits normal relations with Cuba unless it becomes free, though there are no restrictions on our relations with similarly repressive countries like China and Saudi Arabia.

This week even President-elect Trump couldn't resist beating up on Cuba, announcing that he would reverse Obama's opening to the country unless it democratizes. (What's the problem, Mr. President-elect -- that Cuba lacks an Electoral College?)

Imperial communism is no longer a threat to the world. The only imperialism operating today is that of the U.S. dollar and the market rigging done by Western central banks to support it so this country can maintain a huge trade deficit, consuming from the world more than it produces in return.

Developing countries should be left to solve their own problems in their own way, ugly as it sometimes will seem. For foreign intervention creates distractions and resentments that tyrants exploit with nationalism and thus only makes things worse.

Permitted to have normal relations with the United States, Cubans inevitably will want more freedom, will make more demands of their government, and will be drawn into the U.S. economic sphere. Eventually the best Cuban baseball players will be able to earn a good living at home, Havana's team in the Eastern Division of the Liga Nacional will win the World Series, and, as is starting to happen in increasingly capitalistic Vietnam, people will wonder what all the fuss was about.

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ACADEMIA'S OPEN DISLOYALTY: Having taken down the national colors from its flagpoles, Hampshire College, in Amherst, Mass., reflects the increasing disloyalty of academia as it sinks deeper into political correctness.

A spokesman for the college explains that for some students the American flag is "a powerful symbol of fear." But if those students were really so afraid, they wouldn't stick around. They'd high-tail it to a more congenial jurisdiction -- maybe Cuba, though, unlike the United States, that country doesn't let people leave.

Last Sunday military veterans went to the college to protest the decision about the flag. They shouldn't have bothered. Instead they should try to persuade their families to get more particular about the left-wing indoctrination that is passing for higher education. 

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn., and an essayist, mostly on political and social issues.

Josh Fitzhugh: In Cuba, old U.S. cars as metaphor

Editor’s note: Insurance executive, lawyer, farmer, Vermont maple-syrup mogul and former editor and reporter John H. (Josh) Fitzhugh, sent us this piece the other day. By the way, New Englanders should be aware of the very long social, cultural and economic ties between Cuba and our region. The old Boston-based United Fruit Co. is just one example, not to mention the many New England firms  that made candy, booze, molasses and brown and white sugar from Cuban sugar cane, some of it grown on farms with New England-based owners. And yes, the slave trade. My paternal grandparents and parents went down there a couple of times to enjoy the raffish activities under assorted pre-Castro dictators/gangsters.

-- Robert Whitcomb

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I traveled with my daughter, Eliza, on a Dartmouth College-led tour thinking that I should “time travel” to see what Havana and the island were like now before tourism and American business interests transformed it.

I needn’t have rushed. While change is certainly underfoot in Cuba, I left the island after a week with the conviction that the tangled relationship between the U.S. and Cuba will take decades to sort out absent some leadership change as dramatic as occurred a half century ago.

First, a bit about the trip. As required by the rules of the U.S. embargo of Cuba, the trip was organized as a people-to-people exchange to enhance “contact with the Cuban people, support civil society, or promote the Cuban people’s independence from Cuban authorities.” 

Dartmouth’s method for accomplishing these goals was to have us accompanied by a professor of Spanish; to organize numerous lectures by Cuban authorities; to visit various art and music venues; to eat predominately at small private restaurants called paladars; and to permit us to pepper our good-spirited and intelligent Cuban guide, Abell, with constant questions regarding the deficiencies of the vaunted Revolution.  Over the course of the week we toured old and new Havana; Hemingway’s residence, Finca La Vigia; the towns of Cienfuegos and Trinidad; and places in between. To say that we were exhausted by the time we left would be an understatement.

We also all learned a lot, and by that I mean that we all struggled on a daily basis to reconcile our growing understanding of Cuba with opinions as to how American (or Cuban) policy should change to better the lives of the people of both nations. Now that may sound kind of arrogant (who are we to assume such responsibility?) but it was the truth. As an American you can’t travel in Cuba without feeling some responsibility for the ways things are, including the country’s turn toward socialism. And President Obama’s initiative to press for closer contacts with Cuba have given these thoughts greater immediacy.

Now as to some observations. It would appear that over the past  50 years, Cuba has made great strides in health care and education (provided free of charge to the population) but at a cost of economic stagnation and tremendous deterioration of its physical structures. The government is quick to lay the blame for the latter on the embargo but in my opinion it has less to do with that than with the socialist mentality that has discouraged enterprise and private investment of any kind.

A good example is the deterioration that has occurred in old Havana, the location of many beautiful European style structures. Before the Revolution, according to a tour member who had been there, Havana’s old structures, mainly of cement and stone, were in pretty good repair. Today, one in ten is missing a roof; one in five have no windows. Three a day collapse, we were told. The reason? While families are permitted to live in the structures, they are not responsible for their upkeep, which is the government’s responsibility, and whether by design or lack of funds, it has not done so. The picture above is a good example of this decline.

Today, the only structures in old Havana in good repair are tourist spots (such as government-owned hotels) or small paladars snd small hostels, owned by families which under current rules can tap into and keep some of the profits from the burgeoning tourist trade.  Even major government centers, like the Museum of the Revolution, are shabby and decrepit. The Capitol building, designed to look like Washington’s, has been closed for three years (although that may tell more about Cuba’s one-party rule than its finances, frankly.)

Faced with the loss of its sugar daddy, the Soviet Union, Cuba in the mid-‘90s first went through a horrendous economic decline (they call it the “special period”) and then began to pull itself back with help from Chavez’s Venezuela and an increasing reliance on tourism. Today, China and Vietnam seem to have replaced Venezuela as major trading partners but tourism continues to grow, and with it major economic issues.

In short there now appear to be two economies in Cuba: the tourist economy, where taxi drivers, restaurant operators, hoteliers, tour operators, artists and musicians prosper; and the rest of the economy, which suffers along at $20 a month in government wages plus whatever black market income one can find. This income disparity is worsened by those lucky enough to have relatives overseas who send back “remittances,” and most of these are Cuban whites from formerly middle- and upper-middle-class families in Havana.

An example of this disparity was manifest in a dinner we had with some young artists. The young Afro-Cuban at our table has an art degree and has had some moderate success selling his work, mainly to tourists. He now supports his brother a dentist who is on the state payroll.  Another example was a young man whose father was ambassador to Paris in the ‘70s. Trilingual in Spanish, French and English, he worked in a restaurant until three years ago, when he began driving his family’s original 1955 Chevy as a taxi in Havana because his income prospects were better.

The lack of investment is also apparent in the country. Cuba nationalized the hated sugar plantations and mills, but after a disastrous attempt to maximize sugar production in the 90s, has now cut back on sugar production in an effort to diversify agriculture and reduce food imports. Despite efforts to privatize small farms and urban gardens, however, a tremendous amount of land remains fallow, land  that to my eye was probably cultivated before the Revolution. Coupled with the ongoing demographic flow from country to city and the lack of any environment for foreign investment, I don’t see much prospect for agricultural growth and believe Cuba’s goal of producing 70 percent of its own food a pipe dream.

In general we found the Cuban people well behaved, good humored and (as best as one can generalize such things) happy. They are proud of their independence and tolerant of their leaders. They seem willing to recognize mistakes and move on. While constantly reminded by their government that Uncle Sam is evil and untrustworthy, and that the socialist ideals of the Revolution should be venerated and followed, my sense is that most Cubans love American culture and take an attitude toward their government that “this too shall pass.” Many have become very adept at managing their immediate environment to try to benefit themselves and their families.

The prevalence of  old Chevys, Fords, and Cadillacs is a kind of metaphor for this attitude, I think. Keeping these vehicles going is of course a necessity due to the U.S. embargo and a real testament to the mechanical ingenuity of Cubans, but since they are so obviously a symbol of America, and of Cuba before the Revolution, they also bespeak(to me at least) a kind of protest with the way things are and a hope as to what may eventually return. So is the practice of using the dollar sign ($) to denote an item’s cost in pesos.

Like a divorced couple, Cuba and America have much history to remember and to forget, but will forever be linked in some fashion by their proximity to one another.