The Return of the Useful Idiots

These two and others are united not only in their anger at Clinton’s action, but in their disgust at the return of the “useful idiots” — Lenin’s term for credulous non-Communist denizens of the West who were easily suckered by the supposed democratic progressivism of the 1917 Revolution.

Now, the rhetoric spouted these past months by longtime Castro sympathizers like the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell of the National Council of Churches was to be expected. (Last year, in a Havana rally, Campbell begged the forgiveness of Cubans for this nation’s hard line on trade with Cuba: “We ask you to forgive the suffering that has come to you by the actions of the United States. . . . It is on behalf of Jesus the liberator that we work against this embargo.”) Campbell and her ilk are professional ideologues who have spoken passionately for decades about the virtues of Castroite Cuba, Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua, and other Soviet satellites.

No, the really appalling stuff has been written and spoken by the sorts of people who like to refer to themselves as “mainstream journalists.” In newspaper after newspaper, magazine after magazine, and TV chat show after TV chat show, many of those who have been filing reports from Cuba have joined a special dishonor roll exemplified by the notorious New York Times dispatches of Walter Duranty, who praised the Soviet Union’s forced collectivization policy in the late 1920s and early 1930s, even as millions were dying because of it.

One notorious anti-anti-Communist trope revived in recent weeks has been reflected in the oft-expressed notion that Elian Gonzalez’s life in Cuba would be superior to his continued residency in south Florida — that the socialist benefits provided by a Stalinist regime make it a better place for children. “In some ways, young Elian might expect a nurturing life in Cuba, sheltered from the crime and social breakdown that would be part of his upbringing in Miami,” wrote Brook Larmer and John Leland in Newsweek. On The McLaughlin Group, Eleanor Clift said: “To be a poor child in Cuba may in many instances be better than being a poor child in Miami, and I’m not going to condemn their lifestyle.” As if living under the Communist yoke were a “lifestyle choice.”

These words could have come straight from the mouth of Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian’s father. In an interview with Dan Rather on 60 Minutes, for which he was obviously well coached, Juan Miguel asked. “What’s freedom?” Is it “for example, in Cuba, where education and health care is free. Or is it the way it is here? Which of the two is freedom? For example, here, when parents send their children to school, they have to worry about violence. A child could be shot at school. In Cuba, things like that don’t happen.”

The quality of Cuba’s schools and the country’s literacy programs have also been much discussed and compared favorably to what’s available in the United States. On NPR’s Weekend Edition, St. Petersburg Times editorial writer Diane Roberts spoke of a trip she took to London, where her British friends sought answers about the boorish American attitude toward the island nation: “They figure I understand how a nation fixated on family values could hesitate for a moment in restoring a grieving, traumatized child to his parent. I don’t understand. I have never been to Cuba, though most of my British friends have. They come back exclaiming over the turquoise water, the opulent rum, the friendly people who manage to maintain their dignity despite dire poverty, poverty exacerbated by the American embargo.”

Her British friends, Roberts assured her listeners, “also deplore Castro’s jailing of dissidents, gays, and writers. They despise his refusal to hold elections. But most of my British friends have been to Florida, too. . . . They couldn’t help noticing that the literacy rate is higher in Cuba than in Florida.” Cuba claims a 96 percent literacy rate, but of course every single person there was born and raised speaking Spanish. Florida has hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants — many of them refugees from Cuba — who are understandably not entirely literate in English.

Writing in Slate, Columbia journalism school professor Charles Kaiser acknowledged that “the country is pitifully poor, the fancy new hotels and restaurants built for the tourist trade are off-limits to Cuban citizens, and food is far from plentiful. And yet, despite all the hardship and real political oppression, the people remain incredibly vibrant, the literacy rate is higher there than it is here, and there is an astonishing array of music, theatre, and dance available to everyone in Havana. The health care is better, too.”

Would Kaiser, a gay activist, recommend to any HIV-positive friends that they journey to Cuba, home of that superior health-care system, for their treatment? Does he not know that Castro has jailed homosexuals for “counterrevolutionary activities” since the revolution and quarantined AIDS victims in the 1980s?

Michelle Singletary, a financial columnist for the Washington Post, also visited Cuba and found the poverty kind of refreshing. “In Cuba there are no shelves full of Barbie dolls. There is no Disney World,” she wrote approvingly. “Instead of aerodynamic skateboards or sparkling Rollerblades, many Cuban children are forced to fashion their own toys. I watched as three young boys darted around traffic on makeshift scooters made out of old crates. Just down the street, other boys were playing drums on empty cardboard boxes.”

Randall Pinkston of CBS, reporting from Havana, also noted that “people appear untroubled by the lack of modern conveniences.” How different that is from what Singletary finds here in the States: “So many of us in America live what Cubans would consider very prosperous lives. Yet we worry that we don’t have enough while our homes are filled with gadgets and things paid for with money we don’t have. We shower our children with so much stuff that there is always a perpetual layer of toys in their pricey toy bins that they never play with again.”

Their very poverty, in the eyes of Singletary and Kaiser and Pinkston, has given Cubans a spiritual and cultural vibrancy lacking in the softer precincts of the United States.

There is something obscene about visitors to Cuba who revel in the privation that Cubans have not chosen for themselves. It may be true that hardship is good for the soul, but none of those singing its praises have taken their kids to Pennsylvania to bring them up as Mennonites.

In the view of those who have journeyed to Cuba in the wake of Elian Gonzalez’s rescue last year or have only paid vicarious imaginary visits to its shores (like Diane Roberts), it seems that Fidel’s fiefdom may well be a civil society superior to the raucous streets of Miami — which is, recall, a place in which hundreds of thousands of people born in Cuba have demonstrated they can prosper and exercise democratic political power if they are given the right to do so.

It was precisely opinions like these — wide-eyed, credulous expressions of moral equivalence between a totalitarian tyranny and the taken-for-granted freedoms of the West — that helped solidify the anti-Communist alliance whenever differences on other matters threatened to tear it asunder. The return of the useful idiots has brought anti-communism back to life.

Our Cold War has begun anew.

Contributing editor John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post.