There's a number of noteworthy stories available on the web today examining the import of Fidel Castro's resignation. Yet above them all, I recommend this one in FrontPageMagazine by Humberto Fontova. Riveting reading and very, very important.Last September, Fidel Castro vowed to stay in power until President George W. Bush leaves the White House. Even with his failing health, one would have been hard-pressed to bet against the dictator who outlasted nine U.S. presidents and his great sponsor in the Soviet Union. Castro’s retirement yesterday, in favor of his brother Raul, confirms that he will not be able to keep his word. But to understand his legacy, and its implications for Cuba’s future, one must go back to a promise that Castro made at the dawn of his one-man rule nearly half a century ago.
Upon entering Havana on January 7, 1959, Cuba's new leader Fidel Castro broadcast that promise into a phalanx of microphones. "Cuban mothers let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba's problems without spilling a drop of blood." As the jubilant crowd erupted with joy, Castro continued. "Cuban mothers let me assure you that because of me you will never have to cry."
The following day, just below San Juan Hill in eastern Cuba, a bulldozer rumbled to a start, clanked into position, and started pushing dirt into a huge pit with blood pooling at the bottom from the still -twitching bodies of more than a hundred men and boys who'd been machine-gunned without trial on the Castro brothers' orders. Their wives and mothers wept hysterically from a nearby road.
On that very day, the U.K. Observer ran the following headline: "Mr Castro's bearded, youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America's rejection of brutality and lying. Every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence."
These two events perfectly symbolize the Fidel Castro phenomenon, even half a century later: Fidel Castro oppresses and kills while issuing a smokescreen of lies not merely devious but downright psycopathic. The worldwide media abandons all pretense as "investigators" or "watchdogs" and adopts a role, not merely as sycophants, but as advertising agency.
By the time of his delirious, deafening, foot-stomping receptions at Harvard Law School and the National Press Club (most of whose members oppose capital punishment) three months later in April 1959, "Mr. Castro's" firing squads had slaughtered 1,168 men - and boys, some as young as 15.
By the time Norman Mailer (another opponent of capital punishment) was hailing Fidel Castro as "the greatest hero to appear in the Americas!" his hero's firing squads had piled up 4,000 corpses and one of 18 Cubans was a political prisoner, an incarceration rate that surpassed Stalin's.
By 1975, when George McGovern (another opponent of capital punishment) was calling him a "very shy and sensitive, a man I regard as a friend," the bullet-riddled bodies of over 10,000 Cubans lay in unmarked graves, and Cuba still held the most political prisoner as a percentage of population on earth, surpassing Nazi Germany's prewar rate by several multiples.
He brought the world closest of anyone to nuclear Armageddon by pleading, begging, and finally trying to trick Nikita Khrushchev into launching a surprise nuclear strike on the U.S. Yet he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Price by Norwegian parliamentarians.
He jailed and tortured at a rate higher than Stalin. Yet Cuba sits on the UN's Human Rights Committee.
His legal code mandates 18 months in prison for anyone overheard cracking a joke about him. Yet Jack Nicholson and Chevy Chase sing his praises.
He abolished habeas corpus while his chief hangman, Che Guevara, declared that “judicial evidence is an archaic bourgeois detail. We execute from Revolutionary Conviction.” A month later Harvard Law School invited him to address them and erupted in cheers and tumultuous ovations after his every third sentence.
He drove out a higher percentage of Jews from Cuba than Czar Nicholas drove from Russia and Hafez Assad drove from Syria. Yet Shoah Foundation founder Stephen Spielberg considered his dinner with Fidel Castro "the eight most important hours of my life."
He overthrew a black Cuban head of state and replaced his government with one where only nine percent of the ruling Stalinist party is black and where the prison population is 80- 90 percent black. He jailed the longest suffering black political prisoner of modern history. (Eusebio Penalver who suffered longer in Castro's dungeon's than Nelson Mandela suffered in South Africa's.) He sentenced other blacks (Dr Elias Biscet, Jorge Antunez) to 20 year sentences essentially for quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in a public square. Yet he's a hero to the Congressional Black Caucus and receives passionate bear hugs from Charlie Rangel...
There's more...much more from Humberto Fontova. Read it here.
