Cuba

While Fidel Castor would be considered a minor dictator in light of the people he murdered in comparison to other communist dictators, the Cuban revolution is case study in how communist revolutions often occur. 

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Transcript

If you consider how many people Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot killed, Fidel Castro is small potatoes. Yet, he merits a vaunted position in the 20th century’s Hall of Evil. 

Here’s why:

He imprisoned the entire nation of Cuba. 

He destroyed its economy, impoverishing millions while enriching himself. 

He arrested, tortured, and murdered political opponents.

He energetically exported his Marxist ideology throughout Central America, South America, and parts of Africa, spreading death and suffering well beyond the borders of his own country. 

And he almost precipitated a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Had he succeeded in that ambition, he would have even surpassed the grim body count of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. 

Thankfully, even dictators don’t always get what they want.

Born on August 13, 1926, Fidel Castro grew up in comfort and privilege. His father, an immigrant from Spain, was a prosperous sugarcane farmer.

Always in a hurry, Castro was only 27 when he made his first stab at revolution. In 1953, he attempted to overthrow the government of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista. The badly undermanned, poorly executed rebellion was easily thwarted. For his troubles, Castro got a 15-year prison sentence, but served less than two.

Throughout much of the 1950s, his defenders portrayed him less as a Marxist-Leninist than a garden-variety populist and anti-imperialist. According to one of his biographers, “As if leading a consumer revolt, Castro protested high electric bills and inadequate telephone service.'”

In any case, his rebel movement languished in the Cuban hills, hanging on by the thinnest of threads. To say he had one hundred followers would be a generous estimation. Then, out of the blue, he found a savior: The New York Times.

In an exclusive 1957 interview with Times reporter Herbert Matthews, Castro promised that “Above all, we are fighting for a democratic Cuba…” Matthews portrayed Castro’s program as a “new deal” for the island nation. 

“He has strong ideas,” Matthews wrote, “of liberty, democracy, [and] social justice...”

Matthews’ influential reporting breathed new life into Fidel’s movement. Right-hand man and future chief executioner Che Guevara later said, “When the world had given us up for dead, the interview with Matthews put the lie to our disappearance.”

It also helped that President Batista kept killing the heads of other rebel groups in his attempt to hang on to power. 

Castro was the last rebel standing.  

On New Year’s Day 1959, he achieved the goal he had long sought. Batista fled the country. The island nation now belonged to Fidel.

Many Cubans celebrated. They and Western leftists insisted that Cuba had found its own George Washington. In April 1959, Castro appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he declared that “democracy is my ideal… I am not a communist…”

In truth, Castro cared as much about democracy as Lenin, Stalin, or Mao did. He only cared about getting power and keeping power. Once he had it, he announced who he really was all along. “I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life.”

Castro created a totalitarian communist dictatorship — the most militarized, repressive nation in the Western Hemisphere. He banned freedom of speech, press, property, assembly, religion, and even the right of people to leave the country. 

He staged show trials and launched purges. He tossed countless souls into his jails, from dissidents to priests to homosexuals. 

He also brought death.

The Black Book of Communism, the authoritative catalog of communist atrocities, states that in the 1960s alone, Fidel arrested 30,000 people for political reasons and executed 7,000 to 10,000. 

That doesn’t count the 33,000 who drowned in shark-infested waters trying to get to the United States.

The overall death toll grew to 100,000 by the time Fidel “retired” in 2008. 

Castro’s idea of equity was to make everyone equal by making everyone poor. He limited salaries across professions – from janitors to doctors to baseball players – to under $200 per year. By contrast, according to Forbes magazine, his net worth was estimated at nearly a billion dollars.

None of this mattered to the cadre of left-leaning politicians, journalists, and celebrities who, like Herbert Matthews, were dazzled by Castro’s personal charm. Dan Rather, the famed CBS news anchor, called Castro “Cuba’s own Elvis.” 

Fidel’s fan club invariably praised the island’s high level of literacy and “universal” healthcare. But being literate is no substitute for being free, and Cuba’s low-tech healthcare is certainly nothing to celebrate. It’s universal and bad. The proof: who goes there for medical care?

It’s impossible to know, of course, what Cuba would be like today if Castro and communism hadn’t destroyed it.

But based on its economy in 1959, when it ranked fifth in per-capita income in the Western Hemisphere, and based on how Castro’s exiles have so thrived in the United States, it would undoubtedly be far more prosperous than it is now.

And infinitely more free.

I’m Paul Kengor, Professor of Political Science at Grove City College and editor of The American Spectator, for Prager University.