Tyrrell: Castro's murderous legacy
Commentary by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
In these last months of Fidel Castro's moribundity, there is delicious
irony in the film clip of him that is repeatedly shown on cable
television. Wearing a clownishly incongruous jogging suit, the fabled
maestro of revolution and progress is filmed shuffling metronomically,
gray and feeble, blank-faced and apparently going no place. Maybe he is
on a treadmill that we cannot see. Maybe he is merely picking up his
tired feet and putting them back down with no forward motion. Possibly
this whole idiotic scene is a fabrication created by our CIA. Well, if
so, it is a job well done. There is poetry here.
The cadaverish dictator shuffling in place is a perfect metaphoric
rendering of Castro's Cuba over these many decades. He took his country
from prosperity and a place at the head of Latin America in material
terms to the bottom. In practically every material measure his country
is a slum. In terms of freedom it is one vast jail. Had he, when he came
to power after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's seven-year
dictatorship, made good on his promise to return Cuba to the democratic
condition in which it had existed in the 1940s, his country today would
most likely be the richest and freest country south of our borders, and
possibly Castro would be in the pink and deserving of the accolades now
paid him by the American left's rich and fatuous.
According to reports in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Castro and "his
entourage" rejected the conventional medical approach to his intestinal
disorder. Instead they opted for a surgical procedure that is to
medicine what Castro's socialism is to economics, to wit, brute
stupidity. Consequently, after the botched operation his body filled
with feces and infection—again a poetic touch.
I hope Armando Valladares has been following Castro's suffering. Mr.
Valladares chronicled his decades of unjustified imprisonment along with
thousands of others in Castro's vile prisons. Filth and pain were major
features of these hoosegows, as you can judge for yourself in reading
Mr. Valladares's book, "Against All Hope." Feces and infection were
administered to Castro's prisoners by his jailers. They probably still
are. Castro still jails any kind of dissenter and probably takes as much
pleasure in their torture as did Saddam Hussein. Though recently there
has not been much to put a smile on the old monster's mug.
Surely, Castro must still get a kick out of the idiotic laudations
American lefties erupt in after leaving his presence. After Steven
Spielberg dined with him in 2002, Mr. Spielberg enthused that he had
just spent "the eight most important hours of my life." Probably they
had two desserts. After a three-hour visit in 1998, Jack Nicholson
pronounced Castro a "genius. We spoke about everything"—which I guess
makes Mr. Nicholson a genius, too. And remember when the filmmaker Saul
Landau complimented Castro for having "brought a greater equality in
terms of wealth distribution (to Cuba) than I guess any country in the
world today"? There is nothing like widespread poverty to boost a
country's equality index.
Yet I do not think that Castro should take much consolation in such
foolish statements from such foolish people. Praising dictators has been
a weakness of celebrities for years. If Castro thinks the laudations of
nitwits will assure him a lofty place in history, may I refer him to an
earlier dictator similarly praised by nitwits and similarly ruinous to
his country, Benito Mussolini?
Mussolini and his bully boys were an inspiration to celebrities, at
least throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. The liberals at The New
Republic thought him an exemplary forward-looker. Before Mussolini's
star began to dim, Cole Porter had this lovely couplet written into his
sunny song "You're the Tops!": "You're the tops, you're Mrs.
Sweeny/You're the tops, you're Mussolini!"
Now, of course, Mussolini is recognized as a scoundrel and a fool.
Surely, when historians review Castro's career and recognize that he
took over a prosperous country and laid it low with the Marxist-Leninist
moonshine, Castro will be remembered as a fool, too. Yet he will be
remembered as something more than a scoundrel. He and his bully boys
murdered hundreds of thousands. They tortured, exploited and stole. Then
Castro filled with feces and infection.
- R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of the
American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and a
member of the editorial advisory board at Insight on the News. His
latest book is "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House."
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