CASTRO’S CRITICS OF CONVENIENCE
In death, he is once more public enemy No. 1. But in life, the Cuban leader’s sins were matched by the U.S.
As grieving Cubans bury the ashes of the late Fidel Castro this Sunday, can I respectfully ask this question?
What is it about the legacy of Castro that induces otherwise normal conservatives — particularly Americans, but also many Canadians — to race to the nearest mountaintop and shout out all manner of antiCastro insults?
It reminds me of the taunting French soldier in the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper . . . Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.”
I can understand what motivates Marco Rubio. He is the Cuban-American senator who dominated U.S. (and Canadian) media coverage during the days immediately following Castro’s death.
His story is simple. In the finest traditions of American politics, he is a hypocrite. He is someone who, I suspect, would run over his grandmother if it served his political ambition.
In his remarks after Castro’s death, the Florida politician called him an “evil, murderous dictator.” But, not surprisingly, Rubio didn’t mention the lies that have swirled around his own life story.
Until recently, Rubio has claimed he was the “son of exiles,” with his parents forced out of Cuba by Castro, “a thug.” In fact, his parents came to Florida more than two years before Castro took power in 1959.
So, I can understand Rubio’s game as he heaps scorn on Castro’s legacy. It’s sheer political ambition — he is courting the votes of Florida’s Cuban exiles. But what about the others?
That answer surely doesn’t apply to the politicians and pundits elsewhere who snapped out of their usual indifference to Latin America by absolutely revelling in Castro’s death.
Surely, it can’t be Cuba’s size or population. Cuba is minuscule compared with the mighty U.S. and it is even smaller than the state of Florida itself. And does anyone actually believe that these critics care in the least about the plight of the Cuban people?
No, it’s more about domination — and Castro’s refusal to accept it.
What drives many Americans crazy — and their fellow travellers here in Canada — is what they see as the utter arrogance of Cuba’s challenge, and Castro’s success, in taking on America’s criminal dominance of the region in the last half century.
In all of the commentary about Castro’s legacy, that has often been unmentioned or dismissed. Instead, the focus has been on Cuba’s struggles and its failures. There seems to be a self-inflicted amnesia about the overwhelming legacy of America’s historic mistreatment of Latin America.
There is never justification for the shredding of human rights, regardless of the motivation, and that applies to Castro’s Cuba. But to understand the story of modern-day Cuba and Castro’s role in it, one needs to understand and respect the story’s context and history.
The simple fact is that, for all of the struggles of the Cuban people over the past 50 years, most of them are better off now than they were before Castro took over.
And even in the area of human rights, the deplorable record of Castro’s Cuba is far from unique in that region and the United States carries much of the blame for that.
I have been to Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Central America dozens of times, including during the 1980s, when the U.S. fostered civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. I also spent a year in the 1970s travelling by bus through South America when virtually every government was a military regime propped up by the United States.
That included Chile, under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, where more than 10,000 innocent people were killed in the regime’s pursuit of leftists. That also included Argentina, where — during the military government’s so-called “Dirty War” — an estimated 30,000 people were killed.
Both periods are widely acknowledged to be war crimes and both were aggressively promoted and endorsed by the U.S. government at the time, specifically the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. But that, it appears, has been forgotten. This is the same Kissinger who, next weekend, will be honoured in Norway at a Nobel Peace Prize Forum. The question of whether he should stand trial for war crimes will undoubtedly not come up.
History’s full judgment about Fidel Castro’s legacy will only be credible when the complete history of his role in Latin America is told. Tony Burman is former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News.