gracchusdixit

When Fidel Castro died five days ago, after more than fifty years at the helm of Marxist Cuba, Canada’s charismatic prime minister, Justin Trudeau, lamented his passing, observing that Castro had been “a remarkable leader who served his people.”  All hell immediately broke loose, less in Trudeau’s Canada than  here, south of the border, in the United States.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who have long peddled their “life stories” as tales of victimhood under the Castro regime, were quick to disgorge ritual outrage and predictable sanctimony.  Rubio assailed Trudeau’s comments as “shameful and embarrassing;” Cruz called them “disgraceful.”

Coming from the likes of Rubio and Cruz, such rhetorical dudgeon is richly ironic as well as hypocritical, since neither has even the slightest claim to victimhood.  Rubio’s parents emigrated to the United States several years before Castro came to power and suffered not a moment under his regime.  Indeed, they several times considered returning.  Cruz’s Cuban father not only did not suffer, he actually fought in the revolution that Castro led.  When, later in life, his youthful idealism became inconvenient and embarrassing, Cruz père tried to explain it away by claiming that he never realized Castro was a communist—a claim so preposterous that neither Cruz père nor Cruz fils can utter it with a straight face.

The preposterous life stories that Rubio and Cruz have peddled are in no way atypical.  On the contrary, they exemplify a mythology that has sustained Cuban “exiles” from the day they landed on the shores of South Florida and began their coddled, privileged and highly subsidized life in the country that decided to give them shelter.

It is not my intention to defend Castro the dictator or to excuse the worst excesses of the Marxist government that he led, but a long, deep breath of historical context is in order.  For more than fifty years, Americans have been fed such a steady diet of Castro-bashing—not only by the politically powerful Cuban émigré community but also by our own government— that we have lost all sense of proportion or any sense of who the victims really were and are.

Castro was born to privilege and wealth.  He could easily have spent his life enjoying both.  Instead, he decided to champion the cause of those who lacked either, who were, in fact, the victims of the privileged and the wealthy.

Starting in 1956, Fidel Castro led a guerrilla war in the western mountains of Cuba against the corrupt military dictator who then ruled his country.  The name of that dictator was Fulgencio Batista.  For all Castro’s later abuses of power, they pale in comparison with Batista’s dismal record.  Batista conspired with Cuba’s richest landowners, the American mafia, and dozens of major U.S. corporations to exploit the Cuban people and to enrich himself.  In this, he was not only encouraged but actively helped by the government of the United States.  For years, our government gave Batista military and financial support, knowing full well how corrupt he was.

As resistance to Batista’s autocratic rule intensified, he executed thousands of dissidents and political opponents, jailing and torturing many more.  Castro’s guerrilla war soon turned into a full-scale national revolution.  When it became clear that this revolution could no longer be contained, Batista abandoned his supporters and fled the country, with a personal fortune of $300 million.

The nation that Fidel Castro inherited from Batista was a political, social and economic wreck.  The top echelons of Cuban society—a handful of powerful landowners of Spanish descent, upper-middle-class professionals, and influential business people—owned virtually all the wealth, while the vast majority of Cubans were living in a desperate poverty.  Castro’s first concern was to remedy this fundamental inequity.  In less than three years, he vastly expanded public education, built hundreds of miles of new roads, brought clean water and sanitation to countless towns and villages, and created a national health care system that is, to this day, one of the finest in the world, producing results that are as good or better than those in the United States for a fraction of the cost.

Castro’s American critics, particularly those in the Cuban émigré community based in South Florida, would like us to believe that he was Satan incarnate, that they, in turn, are his innocent victims.  This is a fairy tale.  The first wave of Cubans who fled in the wake of Castro’s victory—about 100,000 out of a total population of seven million—were not victims.  They were the beneficiaries of and complicit in Batista’s crimes.  They did not come to the United States seeking freedom.  They came seeking to escape punishment.

Castro’s critics would also like us to believe that his social and economic experiment—the creation of the only explicitly Marxist polity in the Western Hemisphere—has been a total failure and was doomed to failure from the start.  This, too, is a fairy tale.  The most remarkable aspect of Castro’s experiment is not its failure but, rather, its ability to survive against seemingly insurmountable odds.

From the moment Castro took power, the government of the United States set out to strangle, starve, and extinguish the Cuban experiment.  Our obsession was so intense that we tried (and notoriously failed) to invade the country, that we repeatedly tried (and no less notoriously failed) to assassinate Castro himself, that we were even prepared to risk nuclear war with the Soviet Union to bring Castro down.  For almost sixty years, we imposed embargoes and blockades, we harassed and intimidated, we used every trick in the spymaster’s book to vilify Castro’s Cuba and Castro himself.  In the end, none of it worked.  Against all odds, Castro’s Cuba struggled on and survived.

That is why, when a few thousand jubilant Cuban émigrés were dancing in the streets of Miami to ghoulishly celebrate Fidel Castro’s death, millions of ordinary people in Cuba itself were, with tears in their eyes, filling the streets to shout: Viva Fidel.