Justin Trudeau shouldn’t apologize for kind words on Castro.
So. Farewell then, Fidel Castro.
He was 90, had been in poor health for many years and his death was not exactly a jolt. Yet the right still makes hay of history, of Castro facts.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said kindly words appropriate under the circumstances (death). Fidel was a “remarkable leader,” which he was, “who made significant improvements to the education and health care of his island nation,” which he did.
What went unsaid was that Castro had also offered Canadians decades of cheap vacations on a special island where Americans couldn’t go. We were, like, free to travel because we were totally not like the States. It was a point of pride.
As the Star’s David Rider wrote online, it’s not universal by any means but “anti-Americanism is a fact of the Canadian psyche and history.” By chance, many Americans suddenly agree with us.
In 2015, 800,000 Canadians travelled to Cuba, spending $708 million, says StatsCan, and that was a quiet year. Get drunk and fall off a hotel balcony in Cuba, and you’d get excellent medical care. Cool. Just like in Canada. We never miss a chance to be smug.
Any Conservative who deplores Trudeau’s measured praise of Castro should be deploring the Cuba vacationers who are their voters. Their attacks became a toxic family funeral where the tacky Trumpy Kellie Leitch side says the eulogy didn’t capture Grandpa Eudell and the side wearing appropriate funeral apparel gives them an up-and-down look and a roll of the hairy eyeball.
The complaints about Trudeau come from Ottawa types, who are not like the rest of us. I don’t take beach vacations because I hate sand, also heat, but I am an otherwise normal Torontonian who thinks Castro’s tenure was surreal.
He survived the Bay of Pigs invasion, a cruel economic embargo, the U.S. nuclear threat and a stream of CIA assassination plots, including the Exploding Cigar, the Painted Seashell, the Exploding Pen, and the Thallium Salt on His Shoes to Make His Beard Fall Out.
It’s fair to criticize Castro’s spying on his own people and his prisons. But the U.S. spies on its own people, has the highest prison-population rate in the world and set up Guantanamo Bay, a prison and torture camp on Cuban land.
American atrocities dwarfed Cuban ones. Yet Castro lived to see his American tormentor pay the ultimate price: president-elect Trump and a descent into authoritarianism.
I tire of Trudeau saying some minor thing and Ottawa commentators leaping on it and asking if the “honeymoon” is over. They track this as if it’s a stock index. It’s their in-house screen crawl.
Normal people don’t think in these terms. They care about having a job, schooling, health care and not turning into the U.S., where Medicare is about to become an exciting private-contribution plan under Trump’s Tom Price. They crave a bit of beach in February. But go help Cuba’s poor by all means.
Canadians have a pre-existing condition. It’s called being Canadian. We are different. And Quebecers are unique, which is why I admire them. They feel free to contest the mainstream.
Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard didn’t mind Trudeau’s message on Castro. “Yes, his accomplishments will be in various tones of grey — some white, some black — but historians will have to decide this. I see no controversy in describing him as a giant of the 20th century.”
As the CBC’s admirable Aaron Wherry correctly pointed out, “the failure of Western leaders to sufficiently condemn certain international regimes is a regular theme.” They’re too nice to some, too mean to others, it’s very Gilmore Girls.
Face it, who cares what Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio think of Trudeau?
And it was kind of Stephen Harper to visit Raul Castro at the Americas summit in 2015 when Raul’s brother Fidel was ill, though he did try to keep it a secret. When you’re prime minister, you have to dance, even with people you don’t want to date. It’s part of the job.
The Canada-Cuba friendship is part of our history. I suspect the Conservative complainers just want Trudeau to be someone other than himself. They seek a duller man, a droner, a baggy-suited social inadequate with library paste in his hair. Ditch the self-confidence, Trudeau.
I want the PM to stand firm on this one. Apologizing is a national tic. I’m sorry, I do it too, but please consider stopping, if you feel like it.