My e-mail this morning included a copy of today’s must-read for anyone still not convinced about how truly horrible fidel castro has been for Cuba, and the rest of the world: An op-ed piece, published by the Wall Street Journal, by former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares.
Valladares writes:
The legacy of Castro for Cuba will be much like that of Stalin in Russia, Pol Pot and Ieng Sari in Cambodia and Hitler in Germany. It will be the memories of the unknown numbers of victims, of concentration camps, torture, murder, exile, families torn apart, death, tears and blood. Castro will go down in history as one of the cruelest of all dictators — a man who tormented his own people.
But his poisonous legacy will also include the double standard by foreign governments, intellectuals and journalists who fought ferociously against the unspeakable violations of human rights by right-wing dictatorships, yet applauded Castro. To this day many of these intellectuals serve as apologists and accomplices in the subjugation of the Cuban people. Rafael Correa, the recently inaugurated president of Ecuador, has declared that in Cuba there is no dictatorship. Evo Morales, president of Bolivia, considers Castro his mentor and has already shown that he is willing to silence his own critics at the point of a gun. Venezuela, once a democracy, is the new Cuba, replete with a growing population of political prisoners.
Castro hemmed and hawed in the early 1960s, concealing his ideological allegiance to the most murderous system of government humanity has ever experienced. Today’s Latin American caudillos openly express their allegiance to communist ideals. “I am very much of Trotsky’s line — the permanent revolution,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez said in January.
If we have learned anything from Fidel Castro, it is that the totalitarian impulse outlives even its most hardened — and ruinous — practitioners.
The Wall Street Journal has made the column available only to subscribers, but you can read the whole thing here.
We need many more pieces like this one …. many many more to stem the tide from the other side.
There may be worse people than holier-than-thou, self-righteous yet totally two-faced and hypocritical “intellectuals,” but there aren’t many that are more disgusting. They may not realize it, and they certainly won’t admit it, but they are utterly without credibility, honor or respectability.