Skip to main content

Castro We Hardly Knew Ya




Communist dictator Fidel Castro’s non-obituary is beginning to appear in newspapers, now that he has officially surrendered his position as president of Cuba.

Castro held the position, bayonet in hand, ever since he seized power in Cuba on New Year’s Day, 1959. The communist dynasty now falls to his brother Raul, 76 years young.

Despite keystone cop like attempts to remove the now ailing dictator and relieve Cuba of its incubus, the most serious of which was President John Kennedy’s Bay of Pig’s fiasco, Castro’s Cuba has been relatively free of the usual plots and mayhem associated with communist regimes.

Other communist leaders were not so lucky. Trotsky died at the hands of an assassin sent to Mexico by Stalin, who dispatched the war hero and party theoretician with a hatchet. Stalin, “the Breaker of Nations,” authorized the Great Purge of 1937-39, which eliminated opposition from the Old Bolsheviks, and anyone else he thought might oppose his steely will. Stalin himself was poisoned by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, who was ousted from office and sent into exile by his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, he of the unruly eyebrows. The Communist succession in the Soviet Union reads like a page torn out of Suetonius’ “Lives of The Twelve Caesars,” madness piled on madness.

Remaining conspicuously loyal to Khrushchev, Brezhnev organized a plot to remove his former patron. In October 1964, while Khrushchev was on holiday, Brezhnev and his co-conspirators denounced Khrushchev before the Central Committee for immodest behavior, economic failures – though these, more properly, should have been laid at the feet of Lennin and Karl Marx – and voluntarism.

By the mid-1970’s Brezhnev had developed a narcotic dependence on sleeping pill, fed to him regularly by his nurse-companion; finally, his heart gave way, though not from any strain put on it by compassion and magniminity.

Not as deep a thinker as Trotsky, not quite as vicious as Stalin, Castro is the Brezhnev of Latin America. An egomaniac, he has lived a long life full of betrayals and plots, and he will die in his bedwith a smile on his face, a withered old man convinced that he has been faithful to the never ending revolution, if not to the real humane aspirations of the Cuban people.

A real obit whould cheer the sons of liberty everwhere on the planet.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I had the good fortune to work with a former member of Nixon's Secret Army one of the Cuban exiles.

His family's house was taken at machine gun point by one of Castro's direct reports. He was later "behind the lines" during the Bay of Pigs. Captured and later traded via Gitmo for a Castro Operative.

This is a very brutal regime, built on fear, violence and disappearance of critics. No one should expect a change in Cuba. The instrument of that repression was Raul.
Don Pesci said…
I agree with all that. Castro's persecution of democrats in Cuba has nothing whatever to do with the so called trade "blockade." Cuba is poor because the radical egalitarianism in communism, and to a lesser extent in socialism, simply will not permit capital formation, though it does encourage expropriation. Why anyone other than a rapacious capitalist would want to trade with a country like this is beyond me. But none of this matters to those who argue, as does Castro himself, that the hostility of the West to his regime is the cause of Cuba's backwardness.

I once interviewed the author of "The French Connection" (I've forgotten his name) whose father owned hotels in pre-Castro Cuba. He had a rather low opinion Castro.

Keep up the good work on your own blog.

Popular posts from this blog

Obamagod!

My guess is that Barack Obama is a bit too modest to consider himself a Christ figure , but artist will be artists. And over at “ To Wit ,” a blog run by professional blogger, journalist, radio commentator and ex-Hartford Courant religious writer Colin McEnroe, chocolateers will be chocolateers. Nice to have all this attention paid to Christ so near to Easter.

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Did Chris Murphy Engage in Private Diplomacy?

Murphy after Zarif blowup -- Getty Images Connecticut U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, up for reelection this year, had “a secret meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the Munich Security Conference” in February 2020, according to a posting written by Mollie Hemingway , the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. Was Murphy commissioned by proper authorities to participate in the meeting, or was he freelancing? If the former, there is no problem. If the latter, Murphy was courting political disaster. “Such a meeting,” Hemingway wrote at the time, “would mean Murphy had done the type of secret coordination with foreign leaders to potentially undermine the U.S. government that he accused Trump officials of doing as they prepared for Trump’s administration. In February 2017, Murphy demanded investigations of National Security Advisor Mike Flynn because he had a phone call with his counterpart-to-be in Russia. “’Any effort to undermine our nation’s foreign policy – e