National Post (National Edition)
For PET, loving Castro was one way of giving the Americans the finger.
Island nation remains in a vise of dictatorship
For the few genuinely grieving the death of Fidel Castro, perhaps the heaviness was lightened by the global hooting laughter that greeted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fawning tribute to the old tyrant. Laughs are hard to come by when mourning the man who kept an entire nation isolated and poor. But you can’t blame a boy for his father’s friends, and Justin was just a wee lad when his father introduced him to the charms of Fidel.
Justin as first minister likely thought himself restrained in his praise of the butcher of Cuba, given the family fondness for communist regimes. Remember that back in 1984, after Pierre retired from the premiership, he caught up on lost time with his three sons by taking them to Siberia where, he remarked, they could see the future. Much as in communist Siberia, the future to most Cubans looked better elsewhere, which is why one-fifth of the population fled Fidel’s regime. Had the United States permitted free travel across the Straits of Florida, a majority of Cubans may well have left behind the glories of Castroist education and health care for the land of the free.
Ten years ago, Fidel wrapped up his first 47-year term as Cuba’s “president” and handed over the jailer’s keys to his brother Raul. Justin’s brother Alexandre wrote a tribute then to the “patriarch” that makes Justin’s latter-day eulogy seem filled with teenage ingratitude.
“His intellect is one of the most broad and complete that can be found,” wrote Alexandre in the Toronto Star. “He is an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets. On everything. Combined with a Herculean physique and extraordinary personal courage, this monumental intellect makes Fidel the giant that he is.
“He is something of a superman … (some) do occasionally complain, often as an adolescent might complain about a too strict and demanding father.”
The Trudeaus loved Castro, partly because of a familial weakness for dictatorship, partly because he indulged the genuine adolescent resentment of the United States that Pierre carried his whole life. Loving Castro was one way of giving the Americans the finger.
And Castro returned the love, coming to Montreal for Pierre’s funeral in 2000. He was the only sitting leader to bother making the trip, and therefore the only one to witness Justin’s debut as celebrity-son-in-waiting. The roster of foreign guests was otherwise embarrassingly thin, and so it only seems fair that Justin return the favour by leading Fidel’s obsequies — a word not unrelated, one might note in current circumstances, to obsequious.
Yet the international mockery of Trudeau should not distract from a reckoning of a broader sort. One is mindful of the contrasting example of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, whose first 17-year term in office came to end when he permitted a plebiscite on his rule, and abided by the result. Chile did not descend to the poverty of Castro’s Cuba, where the vaunted healthcare system produced doctors who moonlighted as taxi drivers and prostitutes to make ends meet. Yet the human-rights violations were brutal and the corruption vast. So in 1998, when Pinochet was arrested in London on an international warrant, there was widespread satisfaction that he might be held to account for his crimes. Two years later, when a lonely Fidel arrived in Montreal for Pierre’s funeral, there was no fear that he might be arrested. Pinochet’s greater sin, it seemed, was that he was not a communist.
During the apartheid era, it was a mark of conspicuous conscientiousness to not visit South Africa for tourist purposes. In became so fashionable that pop stars even composed a self-congratulatory anthem for themselves, “I ain’t gonna play Sun City,” a casino resort. There was no similar stigma with visiting Cuba, where a sort of segregation was offered, with all-inclusive apartheid offered at hard-currency beach resorts closed to Cuban nationals. South Africa’s sin, it seemed, was that it was not communist.
After the 1991 dismemberment of the communist mother ship in Moscow, Cuba lost its lifeline of subsidies. The usual solution — further impoverishment of the people — was employed of course, but there was also an infusion of tourist dollars. Canadians make up 40 per cent of Cuba’s tourists. So when Raul Castro visits his brother’s grave in 2019 to mark sixty years of his family’s death grip on the throat of the Cuban people, Canadians can know they played a contributing role in prolonging that persecution.
Laugh at the prime minister if you wish. But spare a tear for Cuba, and a prayer that soon Trudeau might compose another eulogy for Fidel’s brother Raul, at which time perhaps Cuba might step toward freedom.
YOU CAN’T BLAME A BOY FOR HIS FATHER’S FRIENDS.