11-28-16 <\/p>\n
I was a young boy in 1961 when I heard on my transistor radio that a Russian \u201ccosmonaut,\u201d Yuri Gagarin, had orbited the earth. A few years after the Soviets had launched Sputnik \u2013 the first man-made satellite \u2013 into earth orbit I remember being amazed at these scientific developments, as I was aware that the American government was scrambling to keep pace.<\/p>\n
I was aware because 1957 had been declared the International Geophysical Year, and that all sorts of school programs and textbooks had begun posing the challenge to nervous 12-year-olds like me the rhetorical question: \u201cYou don\u2019t want us to fall behind the Communists, do you?\u201d So kids seriously thought of doing their physics and chemistry homework, and dreamed of being astronauts instead of cowboys or G-Men.<\/p>\n
In my naivet\u00e9, after hearing that radio news bulletin, I scrambled for pencil and paper, as if this moment would be lost to history if I didn\u2019t write the name of Yuri Gagarin. I recall that I could only phonetically scrawl, \u201cEeuree Gaggarin.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ironically, many people have forgotten Gagarin and Alan Shepard, Neil Armstrong, Gus Grissom, Gene Cernan, and many others, including astronauts Borman, Lovell, and Anders, who read from the Bible to earthlings during a lunar mission. Even President Obama seems to have forgotten a lot of the mission of space exploration, as he transferred many American capabilities to Russia.<\/p>\n
There is no more Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Twenty-five years ago many nations of Eastern Europe and the \u201cWarsaw Pact\u201d foreswore Communism, with hardly a drop of blood shed. Other nations have discovered freedom \u2013 sometimes with steps forward and back along the way \u2013 and the very latest movements are toward nationalist pride, and the rejection of centralized control. <\/p>\n
Winds of liberty blow across the globe. Except in spots like North Korea and Cuba.<\/p>\n
These memories returned this week when Fidel Castro died, aged 90. He was 90 in human years \u2013 some would say \u201cinhuman years.\u201d He kept alive ancient strains of selfish totalitarianism, a regime built on hate and resentments rather than love and constructive fellowship. Democracy might not be the panacea for every society, but you can be suspicious of the leader who cloaks his tyranny in mantles like \u201cpeoples\u2019 republic\u201d and \u201cdemocracy\u201d when self-determination is forbidden. <\/p>\n
I was 10 when a TV in the local bowling alley was turned to the news, and the anchor warned parents against letting their children see the disturbing footage\u2026 so of course I gazed intently. Black and white movies of Havana streets with dead bodies and pools of blood. \u201cBatista flees\u201d was a headline I remember in the New York Daily News about the dictator, scarcely less brutal or corrupt than Castro would be, whom Fidel routed. My father quoted the New York Times description of Castro as an \u201cagrarian reformer.\u201d<\/p>\n
A year or two later Castro declared himself a Soviet-style Socialist and visited a United Nations General Assembly session in New York. He famously stayed in a shabby hotel uptown; trashed his rooms; and embraced Soviet leader Khrushchev. I attempted one of my first caricatures and political cartoons as a budding artist \u2013 it was a natural subject because Castro dominated the news in those days. The bay of Pigs invasion. The Cuban Missile Crisis.<\/p>\n
Through the years he settled in as the hemisphere\u2019s resident dictator, often shunned on the world stage and frequently accommodated by neighboring and worldwide economies. <\/p>\n
My wife, as a girl, had neighbors who fled Castro and had their sugar lands confiscated. I worked summers in college at a factory manned almost exclusively by Cuban \u00e9migr\u00e9s. Many of them \u2013 some, doctors and lawyers whose credentials were not yet recognized in the US \u2013 told me with tears in their eyes of murders they witnessed at the hands of Castro\u2019s police; and telling me earnestly how they appreciated freedom and loved America probably more than I did. I eventually met Fidel\u2019s sister Juanita, whose shame and abhorrence of Cuban Communism was not matched by the other sibling Raul.<\/p>\n
Cuba remained grindingly poor during Castro\u2019s term. He would bleat, and international leftists continue to maintain, that the US embargo was the cause. This was palpable nonsense. It was a policy not to engage in trade: not a blockade. Canada, other Latin countries, all of Europe, and of course the Soviets traded all they could; and provided aid to Cuba. <\/p>\n
Three points are dispositive, especially as the media now will be awash in rosy nostalgia for the eccentric guy with the beard.<\/p>\n
First, Cuba was, and remained, poor for precisely the same reason that the citizens of Socialist economies in Latin America, in Africa, and around the world, suffer poverty. Stifled initiative, inherent corruption, and artificial allocation of resources.<\/p>\n
Second, there are thousands and thousands of Cubans who had their property confiscated or their businesses shuttered. My wife\u2019s neighbors were sugar growers before they fled the island. Neither Cuban citizens nor American investors ever received compensation, even almost 60 year later. THAT is why Washington refused to \u201cnormalize\u201d relations \u2013 that, and the righteous rage of hundreds of thousands who emigrated to the US with nothing their lives.<\/p>\n
Finally, Castro summarily executed many opponents; imprisoned many more; set criminals and mental defects on boats alongside multitudes who braved the open sea in flimsy boats. His defenders in Noo Yawk and the media point to universal health care and free college in Cuba as glories of Castro\u2019s regime, but have been unmoved for decades by closed churches, spying on Cuban citizens, and the denial of political activity. <\/p>\n
Stooges like Jimmy Carter and John Kerry weep tears for Castro; popes like John Paul II and Benedict, surprisingly, visited him, and the current wearer of the Shoes of the Fisherman admired the dedicated Cuban atheist. Other people, the usual gang of leftists, love Castro for reasons of their own (romantic?) but more likely, and frankly, would be in favor of closing Christian churches in America, too; and suppressing political dissent, as in that promised land. <\/p>\n
In a sense, Castro had more integrity than his apologists in America: you can trust a Communist to be a Communist. Liberals will excuse any offense if there is lip-service paid to \u201ceducation,\u201d \u201chealth,\u201d or redistribution of someone else\u2019s property (except their own). Castro was a wolf in wolf\u2019s clothing, worse than Jesus\u2019 memorable warning in Matthew 7:15.<\/p>\n
And as Kipling wrote,
\n\u201cAs it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
\nThere are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
\nThat the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
\nAnd the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
\nAnd that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
\nWhen all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.\u201d<\/p>\n
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