National Post (National Edition)
What about Castro’s victims?
Trudeau tribute ignores dictator’s exiles, prisoners
The prime minister has received a thousand-bomberraids’ worth of invective for his formal statement on the death of Fidel Castro, the communist dictator of Cuba who was an old friend of the Trudeau family. You probably need no reminding of the first sentence of the press release, already lampooned worldwide as a triumph of putrid euphemism: “While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.’ ”
Habitual readers will know that when I see a thousand people gathering stones to throw at one, I try to see things from the side of the one. So my first impulse was to search for even a half-satisfactory justification of the PM’s statement. Alas, nothing came to hand. Just more rocks.
There is the “diplomacy is the art of lying about terrible things” defence: the idea that the interests of Canada might demand that Justin Trudeau use the opportunity presented by Fidel’s demise to suck up to his family and inner circle. This seems to me like an upside-down understanding of diplomacy. The Canadian government may sometimes be obliged to take, and even defend, morally ambiguous actions in the name of state interests. Merely telling sweetsounding falsehoods about individuals is rarely involved. Like Trudeau’s acknowledgment that Castro was a “Comandante” — a pompous sadist who turned a beautiful country into a giant barracks — the diplomacy defence tacitly confesses the truth: Cuban government is lawless personal rule — as of now, the rule of a restless ghost who must be placated.
The statement might even be taken as a cryptic critique of the Castro regime, but there is no evidence the Prime Minister’s friendship with Castro was anything but genuine. When Trudeau writes “I know my father was very proud to call (Castro) a friend” he is stating fact. If the younger Trudeau does not believe that Castro was just a superhuman social reformer, and he really sees Cuba’s generations of exiles and political prisoners as more than hazy abstractions, then his family’s sucking up to Castro is fully conscious, fairy-tale evil, rather than the aftertaste of Fidel’s long-standing glamour cult among halfwit intellectuals.
We can thus dispense with the potential excuse that the statement was scribbled in haste by some well-meaning but uninformed young underling in the PMO: that is speculative fiction, and would make no difference if true. The last refuge open to the Prime Minister is that, after all, press releases are paper. Castro was a real friend to the Trudeau family, even if he was a monster and a torturer, and one does not gratuitously speak ill of the dead. What difference can it make to Cuba, or to its people, or to the Cuban exiles, or to the dead victims of its revolution, or to the dissidents living under house arrest or locked up in jails with murderers and psychopaths?
Well, Fidel died wallowing in the last ditch of the Cold War, and if the Cold War taught us one verifiable thing, one lesson that might be adapted into a loose rule, it is that to speak truth about totalitarian governments is important. Consider Ronald Reagan’s 1983 speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” This remark was universally derided in the liberal press at the time, viewed as a foolhardy act of rhetorical escalation; one historian talked of “the worst presidential speech in American history.” All but the most fire-eating conservative commentators were incapable of seeing the inflammatory word choice as anything but bungled diplomacy.
We now know that the “evil empire” speech was one of the most important of the 20th century. It was not just diplomacy: individuals in the Soviet world, and particularly among Russia’s conquered neighbours, heard of it and were stirred by its frankness. The Yeltsin clique that later held off the Soviet counter-revolution of August 1991 has spoken of the speech’s influence. So has Natan Sharansky, the Jewish “refusenik” who was, in 1983, languishing in solitary confinement at the prison labour camp Perm 35. He has described how his cell block got word of the speech and erupted, joyfully, with the clatter of the Russian prisoner’s centuryold “tap code”: men using cups, plates, any bit of metal, to join in a telegraphic chorus of “Evil empire. .. evil empire ... evil empire.”
No one expects a Reaganite outburst from Justin. But the guiding maxim in being polite about authoritarian strongmen should be to show some awareness, however obliquely or subtly, of their victims. Of course the Castro regime is not technically an empire — but, metaphorically, what else would one call it? The Fidel-Che cult has never ceased to disperse baleful political radioactivity over the South American continent. It is not only Cubans who are poorer and less free because of Fidel.
The grim irony is that Castro did little to disguise his caudillo nature. Even someone with Justin Trudeau’s meandering education would recognize a fascist easily enough in someone who shared Castro’s fondness for military fatigues, his love for terrorizing helpless audiences with marathons of drivel, his suspicion of poets and artists and gays, his crushing of even the most servile political assemblies, his whimsical changing of formal titles, or his inexhaustible use of a pantomime Great Satan to establish his permanent irreplaceability. These factors are not incidental to Castro’s charm: for “progressives” they are the secret essence of it. But they are funny things for a nominally liberal statesman to overlook, even in an old pal.
THE ‘EVIL EMPIRE’ SPEECH WAS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT OF THE 20TH CENTURY.