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2006-08-05 Home Front: Culture Wars
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Why the left loves Castro--from a distance.
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Wall Street Journal house editorial
Fidel Castro's health has been declared a national secret. His brother Raul, to whom Fidel apparently ceded power at the beginning of the week, is nowhere to be seen. American journalists are being turned away at the airport. So one thing for certain hasn't changed on the island: It's still hard to know much about the internal life of the dictatorship that has oppressed Cuba for 47 years. But it seems likely that the era of Fidel Castro is finally winding down toward the dictator's final bravura performance.
But even should this prove true, Fidel can rest assured that his legacy will be honored for a long time. Across virtually his entire career, Fidel has offered himself as the perfect anti-capitalist revolutionary. Though the revolution ended decades ago with Cuba's economy in ruins and its dissident voices in dungeons, the international left then and now has kept the flame of romance burning beneath Castro's carefully nurtured reputation. . . .
Fidel has cultivated his status as a left-wing icon since taking power in 1959. Remarkably, the fact that he has extracted from his impoverished and oppressed people a personal fortune--Forbes magazine estimated it last year at over half a billion dollars for its World's Richest People list--has done little to dent his image as a man of the people. The standard apologetics for the sorry state of the Cuban economy begin from the premise that America, not socialism, is responsible for Cuba's travails. But Castro's personal financial success suggests that in fact substantial revenue is sluicing through the island. Even with the U.S. embargo in place, there's plenty of money to be made in Cuba. It's just that nearly all of it the income from exports of seafood, tobacco, sugar and nickel, not to mention Fidel's real-estate and pharmaceutical operations, goes to the ruling clique or to the military, bypassing the population. There are good reasons to question the embargo, but the notion that it is the source of all of Cuba's ills isn't one of them. . . .
For a while in the 1990s, it seemed that the passing of the Soviet Union would take Castro down in its wake, but in recent years Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has stepped into the support role, lavishing Cuba with oil and other subsidies.
Mr. Chavez, in fact, appears ready to graduate from his role as a Castro protege to fill Fidel's shoes as the hemisphere's anti-U.S. gadfly. He used his recent tour through Europe and Asia not only to hobnob with despots in Belarus and Iran, but also to stock up on Russian weaponry. It seems Mr. Chavez has absorbed the most salient lesson of Fidel's success--the international left will overlook oppression and economic mismanagement at home if you market yourself as David to the American Goliath. The thousands killed by Castro over the years, the tens of thousands more who have died desperately seeking freedom in the U.S., the political prisoners, the torture--all can be forgiven so long as you pose as the alternative to the American hegemon.
Of course it may be no coincidence that most of the admiration all these years has been from afar. The idea of "Fidel" allows his leftish admirers from the comforts of free, mostly capitalist societies to imagine that someone out there is struggling to build a better, more egalitarian way of life--without any of them having to live amid the daily Cuban reality of grinding poverty and political intimidation.
Fidel may die, but his offshore Venceremos Brigade will live on. 
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Posted by Mike 2006-08-05 07:37||
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Posted by SOP35/Rat 2006-08-05 11:52||
2006-08-05 11:52||
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Posted by Chinese Whuger3858 2006-08-05 12:25||
2006-08-05 12:25||
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