Castro’s poisonous export
In April of 1980, Fidel Castro began rounding up Cuba’s criminals, disabled residents and street people and shipping them to the shores of the United States. By September, 120,000 of the “Marielitos” (named after the harbor from which they launched) had reached the Florida coast.
As Castro put it, “I have flushed the toilets of Cuba in the United States.”
Only it didn’t quite work out how Castro had planned. Many of the people sitting in the prisons Castro emptied were there because of political activism, not because of drug dealing or prostitution. And when they reached America, they flourished.
“The vast majority of these people were honest, decent, hard working, industrious people,” said former Miami mayor Maurice Ferre decades later. According to Ferre, most of the exiles are now “doctors, bankers, entrepreneurs who really uplifted the community.” Eventually, the average Cuban-American’s income doubled that of the average Puerto Rican immigrant.
Castro’s most damaging export to America wasn’t the people he sent here. It was the romanticism of his barbarism.
This dewy-eyed view of Castro’s days as a revolutionary was on full display in the days following his death late last week. World leaders and liberal elites sprinted to their keyboards to praise Castro’s accomplishments in a country where children are still encouraged to spy on their parents in case they say anything disloyal to the government.
Most notably, Canada’s premier yoga enthusiast, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, heaped praise upon Castro, calling him a “larger than life” leader and a “legendary revolutionary and orator.” Trudeau concedes only that the murderous dictator was “controversial,” as if Castro had declared Macklemore the world’s greatest rapper.
Similarly, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein called Castro “a symbol of the struggle for justice in the shadow of empire.” Jesse Jackson chimed in, tweeting that “In many ways, after 1959, the oppressed the world over joined Castro’s cause of fighting for freedom & liberation — he changed the world.”
But the progressive love affair with Castro’s commitment to “freedom” and “liberation” is a dangerous semantic sleight-of-hand. It is true, Castro liberated Cuba from the brutal and corrupt Batista regime in the late 1950’s. But in order to believe Castro believed in individual “freedom” or “liberty,” one must not have any calendars that date past 1957.
It was that year that Castro promised free elections; yet soon, he would admit to the world that he was a communist. Within months of taking power, he had executed 300 alleged Batista loyalists. By the mid-1960’s, Castro himself admitted to housing 20,000 political prisoners in labor camps; the number was likely twice that many.
Recall the left’s outrage during the presidential campaign when Donald Trump threatened to prosecute Hillary Clinton if elected? Or when Trump suggested he might not accept the result of the final vote? Or when he said he would block portions of the Internet in the interest of national security?
All these charges were met with charges of despotism — yet many of these charges were made by the same critics on the left who praise Castro’s commitment to communism, violations of human rights and defiance of American “imperialism.”
Even if one believes that more government intervention is a public good, Fidel Castro is not a hill on which it is worth dying. Charles Baudelaire famously said the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. But he existed, and his name was Fidel Castro.