Fidel

I'm sure Rob is right. If Fidel weren't near death, he would not have resigned.

In some ways, I'm kind of sad about this. It would have been nice for him to reach 50 years in power. I always feel the need to defend Fidel. He's not really that defensible I guess. His human rights record is far from good, his willingness to have his country be blown to smithereens in the Cuban Missile Crisis was crazy, his treatment of homosexuals was abysmal, and his inflexibility never said much for building Cuba into a modern state.

However, the Gusanos celebration in the streets when they heard he died a few years ago infuriated me. Moreover, Bush talking about what a dictator Castro is and how free elections are needed is the rankest hypocrisy imaginable. This hypocrisy has continued for the past 50 years. Although free elections would be great in Cuba, the fact is that the U.S. never cared that he was a dictator. They cared that he was a dictator who had expropriated land from U.S. companies and thumbed his nose in the face of the United States.

Sorry that Castro couldn't be the kind of Latin American leader that really promotes democracy and freedom. Like José Efraín Ríos Montt for instance. Or Alfredo Stroessner. Or Augusto Pinochet. Or so many others. I'm even more sorry that he goes against George W. Bush's high standards of democratic rule and human rights, unlike Pervez Musharraf or the Saudi royal family. Or himself for that matter.

It is very interesting to hear the muted reaction in Miami to Castro's demise. Perhaps those earlier celebrations provided the catharsis the Gusanos needed. I doubt it though. I think they've realized that they aren't going to be able to waltz back to Cuba, take back their property, and turn the clock to 1958. They may finally understand that the revolution was always more than Fidel and that enough people still support at least parts of the project to not rise up when Fidel dies. Cubans definitely wish for more economic freedoms, less corruption, and less government interference in their lives. They also like Cuba's great health care and education. Americans talk about the lack of human rights in Cuba, but this is overblown. Yes, you can go to prison for coming out as an enemy of the regime. This is a terrible thing. But it's not as if there are hundreds of thousands of political prisoners, gulags, etc. We're not talking about the Stalinist Soviet Union here, despite what Miami and Washington want you to believe.

I also want to defend Castro from the left. In particular the idealization of Che Guevara over Castro bugs the hell out of me. Che is on the posters because he was a sexy rebel. But Castro stayed and built a country while Che left to play revolutionary in Africa and Bolivia. He wasn't even a smart revolutionary--had he really wanted to make a difference he could have gone to Nicaragua where an actual revolutionary movement was already going on rather than to create one out of nothing in Bolivia. Instead, he had other revolutionaries carry his asthmatic ass up mountains in Bolivia while the local population was wondering what he was even doing there. He died for nothing. Had he gone to Nicaragua or another nation with an active leftist movement, he might have died too, but it would have been for something at least.

One might not agree with everything Castro did. Certainly I don't. But I still respect the man for bringing basic services to the Cuban people. Certainly Cuba is no worse off now that it would have been had the revolution failed. It still ranks as one of the highest Latin American nations on the UN Human Development Index. The hypocritical U.S. government needs to shut the hell up about Castro's decline, start actually supporting democracy and human rights around the world, and engage with Cuba rather than try and bring it down.