WASHINGTON — In these last months of Fidel Castro’s
moribundity, there is delicious irony in the film clip of him that
is repeatedly shown on cable television. Wearing a clownishly
incongruous jogging suit, the fabled maestro of revolution and
progress is filmed shuffling metronomically, gray and feeble,
blank-faced, and apparently going no place. Maybe he is on a
treadmill that we cannot see. Maybe he is merely picking up his
tired feet and putting them back down with no forward motion.
Possibly this whole idiotic scene is a fabrication created by our
CIA. Well, if so, it is a job well done. There is poetry here.
The cadaverish dictator shuffling in place is a perfect
metaphoric rendering of Castro’s Cuba over these many decades. He
took his country from prosperity and a place at the head of Latin
America in material terms to the bottom. In practically every
material measure his country is a slum. In terms of freedom it is
one vast jail. Had he, when he came to power after the overthrow of
Fulgencio Batista’s seven-year dictatorship, made good on his
promise to return Cuba to the democratic condition in which it had
existed in the 1940s, his country today would most likely be the
richest and freest country south of our borders, and possibly Fidel
would be in the pink and deserving of the accolades now paid him by
the American left’s rich and fatuous.
According to reports in the Spanish newspaper El Pais,
Fidel and “his entourage” rejected the conventional medical
approach to his intestinal disorder. Instead they opted for a
surgical procedure that is to medicine what Fidel’s socialism is to
economics, to wit, brute stupidity. Consequently, after the botched
operation his body filled with feces and infection — again a
poetic touch.
I hope Armando Valladares has been following Fidel’s suffering.
Valladares chronicled his decades of unjustified imprisonment along
with thousands of others in Fidel’s vile prisons. Filth and pain
were major features of these hoosegows, as you can judge for
yourself in reading Valladares’s book Against All Hope.
Feces and infection were administered to Fidel’s prisoners by his
jailers. They probably still are. Fidel still jails any kind of
dissenter and probably takes as much pleasure in their torture as
did Saddam Hussein. Though recently there has not been much to put
a smile on the old monster’s mug.
Surely, Fidel must still get a kick out of the idiotic
laudations American lefties erupt in after leaving his presence.
After Steven Spielberg dined with him in 2002 Spielberg enthused
that he had just spent “the eight most important hours of my life.”
Probably they had two desserts. After a three-hour visit in 1998
Jack Nicholson pronounced Fidel a “genius. We spoke about
everything” — which I guess makes Nicholson a genius, too. And
remember when the filmmaker Saul Landau complimented Fidel for
having “brought a greater equality in terms of wealth distribution
[to Cuba] than I guess any country in the world today”? There is
nothing like widespread poverty to boost a country’s equality
index.
Yet I do not think that Fidel should take much consolation in
such foolish statements from such foolish people. Praising
dictators has been a weakness of celebrities for years. If Fidel
thinks the laudations of nitwits will assure him a lofty place in
history may I refer him to an earlier dictator similarly praised by
nitwits and similarly ruinous to his country, Benito Mussolini?
Benito and his bully boys were an inspiration to celebrities, at
least throughout the 1920s and early 1930s The liberals at the
New Republic thought him an exemplary forward-looker.
Before Benito’s star began to dim, Cole Porter had this lovely
couplet written into his sunny song “You’re the Tops!”: “You’re the
tops, you’re Mrs. Sweeny/You’re the tops, you’re Mussolini!”
Now, of course, Mussolini is recognized as a scoundrel and a
fool. Surely, when historians review Fidel’s career and recognize
that he took over a prosperous country and laid it low with the
Marxist-Leninist moonshine Fidel will be remembered as a fool too.
Yet he will be remembered as something more than a scoundrel. He
and his bully boys murdered hundreds of thousands. They tortured,
exploited, and stole. Then Fidel filled with feces and
infection.
