Castro’s Curdling Attempt To Milk A Deal
In a tie and suit, Fidel Castro, describing himself as a politician, flattered the media bigwigs gathered for lunch in Mort Zuckerman’s Fifth Avenue apartment, saying: “You are the cream of the crop.”
A dollop of sour cream came from this corner: If you claim to be a politician, why have you been unwilling - for 36 years - to face an opponent in a democratic election?
The Cuban dictator down-mouthed elections as “a popularity competition between political personalities” engaged in by “speakers good at theatrics, demagogues and liars. I don’t want to get involved in that kind of competition.”
Castro, the non-demagogue, is above all that. He took pains to remind us he had won a law school election 180-33 and had perfected the techniques of organization and direct mail “even before your Christian right.”
Then why not let the Cuban people vote? “I am not afraid, but we do not have presidential elections in our country.” Later, he compared his selection with that of the pope, elected by a ballot of cardinals.
All this nonsense is being peddled by the only totalitarian ruler in our hemisphere. His secret police informers, trained by the Stasi spies of East Germany, permeate every Cuban village and walk of life; Amnesty International counts 600 prisoners rotting in Cuban jails for having dared to oppose the dictator’s rule. The Stasi and the old Soviet KGB secret police would be proud of their pupil.
Castro, who rules by fear, avoids free elections because he is afraid he would lose. And that should not be surprising because he is one of the great losers of our time.
After seizing power, he lost his revolutionary soul by taking Cuba down the communist road to repression. He lost all chance for Cuban prosperity by burdening the people with 3.2 million governmental workers and a huge standing army to protect his regime from any need for elections. He lost Cuba’s independence by making it a vassal of the Soviet Union, addicted to Soviet subsidies, and renting out Cuban youths as mercenaries in Moscow’s failed African adventures. Then, when that blood money dried up, Cubans suffered as never before.
Despite that record of colossal failure, Castro gets the loudest applause of all speakers at the United Nations. Why? Not for anything he has done for Cubans nor for his necrophiliac love for a dead doctrine. His popularity among the striped-pants set is rooted solely in his four decades of defiance of the United States and his contempt for American democracy.
Every U.N. diplomat who envies and resents U.S. power gets a kick out of cheering Castro, who has clung to unelected power during nine elected U.S. presidencies. (As the dictator denounced us, only the Israelis sat on their hands.)
Turning biblical righteousness on its head, Castro is playing David to our Goliath, a strategy aimed at snatching one final personal victory.
That is why he told the luncheon guests that “the United States is so astonishingly powerful that not even the Romans, Napoleon, the Germans in both world wars can compare. Your economic and political influence has no parallel.” In the face of such power, unlike David, “we don’t even have a slingshot.”
This is the plaintive we’re-no-longer-a-threat plea. End your embargo against us; send us your tourists; subsidize my regime with your investment money; help me adopt capitalism without freedom and help me rule for life with an iron fist; let me enjoy the last laugh at the exiles in Miami and the Colossus of the North.
This from the man who stunted Cuba’s growth and jailed or exiled many of its patriots. To obscure his failure, the communist who victimized his people is posing as the victim of a United States that he claims seeks “hegemony in a unipolar world.”
Some U.S. business executives comfortable with state-monopoly deals help Castro sell this line; they’re the same ones who assured us that trade would bring an end to repression in China.
President Clinton cannot admit it publicly for fear of losing Florida in 1996, but if re-elected, he would, I suspect, end all pressure to bring down Castro, trotting out the same vague reason he used to embrace Vietnam: “It’s time.”
It will be “time” only when dictator Castro quits or submits to free elections. Communism is tyranny that is bound to fail. Let the loser lose.
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