I’m still a little awed that Fidel Castro, the communist dictator of Cuba, resigned. The guy just wouldn’t go. This is a man who was in power at a time when he could call Ike Eisenhower “the Golfer in Chief” of America and was still president when he called Jeb Bush a “fatty” half a century later.
Reactions to his resignation were mixed. Barack Obama said he would meet with Castro’s brother, Raul. Hillary Clinton, in a state of one-upmanship, said she would meet with Raul but only under certain conditions. John McCain, sounding less like a respected senator and war hero and more like a disappointed third grader, said, “I hope he has the opportunity to meet Karl Marx very soon.”
Okay, I need to admit that a third grader wouldn’t be nearly witty enough to say that, but my feelings on Castro are a little more complex than “I hope he dies.” I’m no apologist for Old Fidel, but I hope that America can learn something from the bastard before we forget about him completely.
First and most importantly, I see him as a reminder that when America chooses to mess with other countries’ governments in order to promote its foreign policy, it will come back up to bite us. Always. The reason Castro was able to come to power, held on to it and made so many Cubans’ lives miserable is directly because America gave him the tools. It happened in Iran, it’s happening in Iraq, but it happened first in Cuba.
Castro was not Cuba’s first dictator. Before Fidel came to power in 1959, there was Fulgencio Batista. He was a dog of a man. Batista played to the interests of big business only, leaving thousands of ordinary Cubans to beg in the gutters. His scheme for making Cuba rich included having American businesses (read: the Mafia) build giant casinos in Havana in order to spread the wealth of rich Americans among rich Cubans. The American administrations of the’50s loved him.
By the time Castro’s revolution reached Cuba, average Cubans were so poor and so downtrodden that the spirit-crushing, hellish system of communism sounded like a damn good alternative. We could blame the Cubans for being easily seduced by this false promise of freedom, but we’d be better off looking in a mirror.
The trade embargo on Cuba should also be a lesson for us in how not to do economic sanctions. The Cuban trade embargo started in 1962, a few minutes after the Kennedy administration smuggled 500 premium cigars from Havana. Since then, the embargo works something like this: We don’t get stogies, the Cubans don’t get better food or blue jeans, and Castro gets to blame the inherent failures of communism on the Gringo’s trade embargo. The embargo didn’t cripple Castro. It let him stay in power.
Castro is also a good reminder for Americans to live up to the standards we love to profess. Every time I hear some ultra-patriotic senator decrying better relations with the Cuban government because of Castro’s gross violations of human rights, I remember Guantanamo bay. It’s on the same island. The same type of torture is being done there to people who have no rights. The only difference is that we’re the ones doing it.
El Presidente should also teach us to be mistrustful of most revolutionaries, especially our own. There isn’t much difference between Castro and our own Founding Fathers. Jefferson kept slaves as a workforce and a harem. Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton were notorious boozehounds who would sleep with anybody who had four limbs and a working heart. Those in America who stayed loyal to the Crown were tarred, feathered and run out of the country. It isn’t so different from the Cuban Revolution, other than the way we look at it.
The fact that we can learn all this from Castro’s dictatorship does not change what he did. During his revolution, the once idealistic student became a bigger monster than Batista ever were. There are 50,000 graves and nearly a million Cuban refugees in the U.S. who can be directly attributed to Castro and his policies. Several of his own children have escaped Cuba and now preach against their father and his policies.
It is too easy, however, to think of Castro as simply an evil man who should die. He rose to a dictatorship and stayed there because America gave him all the tools and support he needed. Unlike John McCain, I don’t hope Fidel Castro dies soon. I hope he lives long enough to remind us Americans why we need to change how we deal with dictators like him.
Ted Rogers is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].
