History Will Not Absolve Him

The court sentenced Castro to 15 years in prison, 1 of only 31 defendants who were convicted. And Castro and his brother Raúl were in fact released less than two years later. From their release in 1955, it was not even four years to the overthrow of the dictator on January 1, 1959. That day, Castro pledged, “I am not interested in power nor do I envisage assuming it at any time. All that I will do is to make sure that the sacrifices of so many compatriots should not be in vain, whatever the future may hold in store for me.”

This was of course a lie and he immediately seized power. Two years later Castro acknowledged, “Do I believe in Marxism? I believe absolutely in Marxism! Did I believe on Jan. 1st? I believed on Jan. 1st! Did I believe on July 26th? I believed on July 26th!” January 1, 1959, and July 26, 1953, were the famous dates to which he was referring. Castro’s trial under Batista was not fully fair in the Anglo-Saxon sense, but consider the facts: He was allowed to defend himself in court and to speak as long as he wished; all defendants had lawyers; most defendants were acquitted; and Castro was soon released in an amnesty.

From this, Castro learned not that justice should be blind, or lenient, but that it should be eliminated. As soon as he took power the killings began. Not until his “revolution” has been overthrown and Cuba is free will the records emerge, but it is clear that there were hundreds of summary executions. When criticized for the kangaroo courts (“revolutionary tribunals”), Castro replied, “Revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction. .  .  . We are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing murderers and they deserve it.”

A good example, cited in Glenn Garvin’s masterful obituary of Castro in the Miami Herald, is the March 1959 trial of 44 officers and men from Batista’s air force. Oddly enough, the tribunal acquitted them. But as Garvin writes, “An enraged Castro instantly created a right of appeal for prosecutors. .  .  . A second tribunal sent the men to prison for 30 years. At that, the airmen were lucky. Though Cuban law did not permit capital punishment, the revolutionary tribunals were sending a steady stream of men to the firing squad.”

That was 1959, and nothing changed as the decades passed. Garvin writes:

When Cuban government ships spotted a tugboat full of refugees headed for Florida on July 13, 1994, they blasted it to pieces with high-pressure fire hoses. “Our tugboat started taking on water,” recounted one of the survivors, María Victoria García. “We shouted to the crewmen on the boat, ‘Look at the children! You’re going to kill them!’ And they said, ‘Let them die! Let them die!’ ” Forty-one of the refugees did.

The story of Castro’s Cuba is in substantial part the story of refugees, and there are stories enough to break one’s heart. From December 1960 to October 1962, more than 14,000 Cuban children arrived alone in the United States in “Operation Peter Pan,” or “Pedro Pan” as they called it. It was organized by the Catholic church in Miami, at the request of parents in Cuba who wanted their children to get to the United States and thereby escape Marxist-Leninist indoctrination. Were these the children of the rich? No; those children were already in Miami with their parents. These were middle- and lower-class children whose parents could not see a future for them in a Communist Cuba. Half were reunited with some family member in Florida immediately; the church cared for the other half.

In a sense this operation was a success, as the Cuban migration to Florida was a success: Miami was reborn with the energy of the Cuban arrivals. Statistics show how remarkably that immigrant group raised itself from poverty to middle-class status and beyond. But the human misery is of course immeasurable—families broken up, homes and relatives and professions and lives left behind in Cuba. All for what?

For freedom, one of the many commodities that could not be found in Castro’s Cuba. There were many, many others that could not be found, ranging from justice to sugar. Yes, sugar. As Garvin notes, “In 2007, production of 14 of Cuba’s 20 key products was lower than in 1989. One, the sugar crop, was the smallest in a hundred years.”

The show trial of former provincial military commander Jesús Sosa Blanco, center, in a Havana sports arena, January 22, 1959. Blanco was executed, as were thousands of others. (Photo Credit: Associated Press)

This should not be a surprise, for Castro’s Marxism and his command economy destroyed the productivity of the island just as communism destroyed so many other economies. This was a fact carefully hidden by Castro and his apologists, who spewed out endless propaganda about the wonderful social and economic advances made under his rule. From the very beginning, he realized that the international press—and more broadly global public opinion and political leaders—were important, could be fooled, and were often craven. The first example came in the 1950s, when Castro took in Herbert L. Matthews of the New York Times, who famously became a propaganda tool for Fidel. As Garvin reports, “Though the rebels had barely 20 bedraggled men, Castro marched the same group past Matthews several times and also staged the arrival of ‘messengers’ reporting the movement of other (nonexistent) units.” Matthews’s story in the Times in February 1957 said that Castro’s “program is vague and couched in generalities, but it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic, and therefore anti-Communist.”

There is not a very long distance between Matthews and people like Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada, whose remarks on the occasion of Castro’s death have rightly been the subject of global ridicule. Here is the heart of his statement:

Trudeau was very far from alone: Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labour party, said, “From building a world-class health and education system, to Cuba’s record of international solidarity abroad, Castro’s achievements were many.” Ban Ki-moon at the U.N. said Castro “was a strong voice for social justice.” Presidential candidate Jill Stein proved herself more red than green by tweeting, “Fidel Castro was a symbol of the struggle for justice in the shadow of empire. Presente!” President Obama decided the United States needed to be “presente” at Castro’s funeral, sending a deputy national security adviser down to Havana to pay his respects. And Jimmy Carter weighed in as well: “Rosalynn and I share our sympathies with the Castro family and the Cuban people on the death of Fidel Castro. We remember fondly our visits with him in Cuba and his love of his country.”

So much for Carter’s reputation for supporting human rights. In fact, Fidel Castro was even by global standards an exceptionally brutal dictator. Vicious and despicable actions that would have made page one of the Times and would never be forgotten had they been undertaken by Augusto Pinochet or any of a dozen other Latin military dictators have been buried in memory holes. Here’s just one: The Inter-American Human Rights Commission stated in 1967, “On May 27, [1966,] 166 Cubans—civilians and members of the military—were executed and submitted to medical procedures of blood extraction of an average of seven pints per person. This blood is sold to Communist Vietnam at a rate of $50 per pint with the dual purpose of obtaining hard currency and contributing to the Vietcong Communist aggression. A pint of blood is equivalent to half a liter. Extracting this amount of blood from a person sentenced to death produces cerebral anemia and a state of unconsciousness and paralysis. Once the blood is extracted, the person is taken by two militiamen on a stretcher to the location where the execution takes place.” As the Center for a Free Cuba has noted, “By 1995, blood exports of US$30.1 million were Cuba’s 5th export product after sugar, nickel, crustaceans, and cigars.”

It is worth a look at those widespread claims that Castro, whatever his “flaws,” his “failures,” or his “controversial actions,” did so much for the health and welfare of his people. The argument from his defenders is that while it’s unpleasant that he was a bit tough and frog-marched the Cuban people forward, forward they did go.

Jimmy Carter arrives in Havana, Sunday, May 12, 2002. (Photo Credit: Cristobal Herrera / AP)

But this is false, as are all arguments that dictatorship and brutality are required for economic and social progress. Compare Cuba with Costa Rica, another small Latin country but one that has enjoyed democracy for all the decades Castro brutally ruled over Cuba. In 1960 both Cuba and Costa Rica had comparatively high literacy rates, just under 80 percent. And today, literacy in both approaches 100 percent. Castro and communism had nothing to do with Cuba’s advances in literacy before he took over in 1959, and as Costa Rica shows, further advances were not unique nor did they require a dictatorship. And as to health, one decent measure is life expectancy. In Cuba (according to the World Bank) life expectancy in 1960 was 64 years and has now risen to 79. In Costa Rica in 1960 it was 62 years, and has now risen to the same 79—without political prisons, executions, and the flight of millions of citizens. Final measure: gross national income per capita. Under Fidel, Cuba’s rose from $850 (in 1972) to just under $6,000. In Costa Rica it rose from $360, less than half the figure for Cuba, to over $10,000 today. The myth of Cuba’s great socioeconomic advance under Fidel is just that—a myth that can be exploded fast if anyone cares to look. A recent study of the Cuban economy since 1959 looked at the various arguments excusing its failures (excuses such as the U.S. embargo) and concluded that it was communism, meaning especially insistence on central planning and the abolition of private property, that was to blame. The economists (Felipe Garcia Ribeiro, Guilherme Stein, and Thomas H. Kang) concluded “it does not seem that history will absolve the Cuban regime.” And the useful idiots writing about social progress in Cuba must also contend with other aspects of “social life” there, as Garvin notes: “By the 1990s, the island’s suicide rate had tripled from pre-revolutionary levels, and one of every three pregnancies ended in abortion.”

So what has been Fidel’s appeal? How does a vicious and brutal dictator become a hero to the left? Why is a man who executed his opponents, eliminated any trace of freedom of the press or speech, or of justice, and caused a million refugees to flee their homeland mourned? Why does such a man’s death elicit praise from trendy liberals like Justin Trudeau? What is the appeal of a megalomaniac? It cannot really have been his oratory, because no speech that lasts three or four hours is anything more than an expression of control over the audience. Garvin reports that Castro’s “record, in 1968, was a meandering discourse that lasted nearly 12 hours.” That is sadism, not oratory.

There is of course a broader question here, of which Fidel Castro is merely the latest example (though Stalin and Mao are better ones): Why are crimes on the left ignored, minimized, and readily forgiven when abuses on the right are publicized, magnified, and recalled decades later? Certainly in Castro’s case his anti—Americanism played a great role in making him a global hero on the left. It is not an accident that the New York Times‘s headline on his death was “Fidel Castro, Cuban Revolutionary Who Defied U.S., Dies at 90.”

Castro jumped into the Soviets’ lap; he was not pushed. Garvin: “He moved almost immediately to confront Washington, while courting surprised Soviet leaders. He brushed aside U.S. offers of economic aid.” Soviet and Cuban propaganda machines built up the Castro myth, and Castro not only “built socialism” at home but sought to export it—to Angola, Central America, Venezuela, and indeed anywhere the Yanqui Empire could be confronted. By 1975 he had put more than 25,000 troops in Angola—and in a classic case of seeing what the left wanted to see, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, famously called them a force for “stability and order.” In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Castro urged Khrushchev to launch the missiles the USSR had put in Cuba against the United States if the island were invaded, and by some accounts even urged a preemptive Soviet attack to prevent such an invasion. But again, all this is forgotten—if it does not indeed add to his legend as one who defied the gringos.

Garbage and decrepitude in Havana, 2015. (Photo Credit: Associated Press)

What in fact did Castro do for Cuba? The great social and economic gains are delusions. The grand international adventures resulted in many deaths—of Cubans, to be sure, but as well of Latins and Africans in wars he fed. He created a system of neighborhood spies, political tribunals and political prisons, viciously harsh sentences and chronic maltreatment of prisoners, that was a miniature version of the nastiest Communist regimes anywhere. It is impossible to believe that Cuba—whose Leninist system was always unique in the Caribbean and indeed in the hemisphere—will not some day be free of all this, just as Germany is free of the Stasi system.

What will then remain? Two things. The first is, again, Miami—and more broadly a Cuban diaspora in the United States, Spain, and elsewhere that enriches every country to which Cubans fled to escape the clutches of Fidel Castro. And the second is heroes.

Communism always produces heroes—like Anatoly Scharansky and Vladimir Bukovsky and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union, Lech Walesa and Václav Havel among the Soviet satellites, and Liu Xiaobo in China. So it has been in Cuba. Huber Matos was a comandante just like Fidel in the Cuban revolution, but opposed the Castros when he saw that they were Communists. For this he was sentenced to 20 years in prison and made to serve every last day (there were no amnesties for Fidel’s enemies). Matos later wrote that “I had to go on hunger strikes, mount other types of protests. Terrible. On and off, I spent a total of sixteen years in solitary confinement, constantly being told that I was never going to get out alive, that I had been sentenced to die in prison. They were very cruel, to the fullest extent of the word.” But he survived, and when he emerged he continued his struggle for freedom in Cuba by founding Cuba Independiente y Democráatica, which he led until his death two years ago. Armando Valladares served 22 years in solitary confinement in Castro’s prisons and emerged to write the classic prison memoir Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro’s Gulag—and was then named by President Reagan to represent the United States at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. There are, as always with communism, too many heroes to mention—from the “Ladies in White” who have marched each Sunday to bring attention to imprisoned relatives and who are routinely detained and beaten, to individuals like Oswaldo Payá, who started the “Varela Project” to demand multiparty democracy and was killed in a 2012 automobile “accident” that was pretty clearly staged by the regime.

It may be that on the far left internationally, Fidel Castro will always be a heroic figure, like his comrade Che Guevara, and perhaps they will continue to adorn walls in the dorm rooms of college students who know no better; it may be that fools in the West will celebrate him for decades to come, as they have in the past week with their ignorant eulogies and tweets. But in Cuba, the truth about Fidel Castro is lived each day as it has been since January 1, 1959, and the truth will emerge when the regime falls—however long that takes. Then the statues will all be brought down and the murals will be painted over, and the story of Fidel Castro will be told by those who suffered most from his brutality, his hatreds, and his megalomania: the people of Cuba. Today’s obituaries cannot reflect their views, but in due time they will have their say. And they, like history, will not absolve him.

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and served as assistant secretary of state for Latin America in the Reagan administration.