Farewell to Cuba’s brutal Big Brother
By Carlos Eire
WashingtonPost.com
Carlos Eire is an author and the T.L. Riggs
Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale
University.
One of the most brutal dictators in modern
history has just died. Oddly enough, some will mourn
his passing, and many an obituary will praise him.
Millions of Cubans who have been waiting impatiently
for this moment for more than half a century will
simply ponder his crimes and recall the pain and
suffering he caused.
Why this discrepancy? Because deceit was one
of Fidel Castro’s greatest talents, and gullibility
is one of the world’s greatest frailties. A genius
at myth-making, Castro relied on the human thirst
for myths and heroes. His lies were beautiful, and
so appealing. According to Castro and to his
propagandists, the so-called revolution was not
about creating a repressive totalitarian state and
securing his rule as an absolute monarch, but rather
about eliminating illiteracy, poverty, racism, class
differences and every other ill known to humankind.
This bold lie became believable, thanks largely to
Castro’s incessant boasting about free schools and
medical care, which made his myth of the benevolent
utopian revolution irresistible to many of the
world’s poor.
Many intellectuals, journalists and educated
people in the First World fell for this myth, too —
though they would have been among the first to be
jailed or killed by Castro in his own realm — and
their assumptions acquired an intensity similar to
that of religious convictions. Pointing out to such
believers that Castro imprisoned, tortured and
murdered thousands more of his own people than any
other Latin American dictator was usually futile.
His well-documented cruelty made little difference,
even when acknowledged, for he was judged according
to some aberrant ethical code that defied logic.
This Kafkaesque moral disequilibrium had a
touch of magical realism, for sure, as outrageously
implausible as anything that Castro’s close friend
Gabriel García Márquez could dream up. For instance,
in 1998, around the same time that Chile’s ruler
Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London for his
crimes against humanity, Cuba’s self-anointed
“maximum leader” visited Spain with ample fanfare,
unmolested, even though his human rights abuses
dwarfed those of Pinochet.
Even worse, whenever Castro traveled abroad,
many swooned in his presence. In 1995, when he came
to New York to speak at the United Nations, many of
the leading lights of that city jostled so intently
for a chance to meet with him at media mogul Mort
Zuckerman’s triplex penthouse on Fifth Avenue that
Time magazine declared “Fidel Takes Manhattan!” Not
to be outdone, Newsweek called Castro “The Hottest
Ticket in Manhattan.” None of the American elites
who hobnobbed with Castro that day seemed to care
that he had put nuclear weapons to their heads in
1962.
If this were a just world, 13 facts would be
etched on Castro’s tombstone and highlighted in
every obituary, as bullet points — a fitting
metaphor for someone who used firing squads to
murder thousands of his own people.
●He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet
Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.
●He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and
allied himself with many of the worst dictators on
earth.
●He was responsible for so many thousands of
executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise
number is hard to reckon.
●He brooked no dissent and built concentration
camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling
them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage
of his own people than most other modern dictators,
including Stalin.
●He condoned and encouraged torture and
extrajudicial killings.
●He forced nearly 20 percent of his people
into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their
deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing
from him in crude vessels.
●He claimed all property for himself and his
henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished
the vast majority of his people.
●He outlawed private enterprise and labor
unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and
turned Cubans into slaves of the state.
●He persecuted gay people and tried to
eradicate religion.
●He censored all means of expression and
communication.
●He established a fraudulent school system
that provided indoctrination rather than education,
and created a two-tier health-care system, with
inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and
superior care for himself and his oligarchy, and
then claimed that all his repressive measures were
absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these
two ostensibly “free” social welfare projects.
●He turned Cuba into a labyrinth of ruins and
established an apartheid society in which millions
of foreign visitors enjoyed rights and privileges
forbidden to his people.
●He never apologized for any of his crimes and
never stood trial for them.
In sum, Fidel Castro was the spitting image of
Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” So,
adiós, Big Brother, king of all Cuban nightmares.
And may your successor, Little Brother, soon slide
off the bloody throne bequeathed to him.