Someone remind me: What terrible threat did Rhodesia—which fought on the Allied side in both world wars and offered to fight alongside us in Vietnam—ever present to the United States? Fidel Castro called the United States a “vulture preying on humanity”—but Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith (who flew combat missions on our side in World War II) never did, nor did he provide a haven for terrorists; indeed, he fought terrorists and Communists.
Someone remind me: When did apartheid-era South African firing squads shoot down scores of U.S. citizens, or steal $1.8 billion from American citizens, or travel to Cu Loc prison camp outside Hanoi to join in torturing American POWs to death, the way Castro’s Cuba did? In fact, South Africa tried to stem Cuba-supported Communism in Africa.
In Latin America, someone remind me: When did Uruguay, or Paraguay, or Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, or Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaragua point missiles at us?
Perhaps sanctions are to be applied to punish regimes for their
internal
wickedness? Fine, but neither Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, nor apartheid South Africa, nor Pinochet’s Chile had political incarceration rates anywhere near to Castro’s, or execution rates, or rates of state-supervised theft of private property, or the total denial of human rights, or anything remotely like the internal repression of the Cuban police state. During the height of apartheid, black Africans immigrated into South Africa; no one starved in Rhodesia because of state-run farms and rationing (they had to wait for Robert Mugabe for that); and Chile under Pinochet enjoyed a famous free-market economic recovery. Latin Americans aren’t banging on Cuba’s door, hoping to get into that Communist paradise; no one swims to Cuba hoping to enjoy greater freedom and a higher standard of living.
Ponder this for second, friends: Before Castro, more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the United States. Cuba went from being the Western Hemispheric nation with the
highest
per capita immigration rate,
2
(yes, higher than the United States, including the Ellis Island years) to one where 20 percent of the population
fled
, and where probably 80 percent sought to flee. They fled in planes and ships, they crammed into the steaming holds of merchant vessels, they squeezed in the wheelholds of transatlantic jets, they leaped into the sea on rafts and inner tubes, knowing that their chances were about one in three of making landfall. Thus they vote with their feet against a place Jack Nicholson declared “a paradise.” Thus they flee the handiwork of the man Colin Powell assures us “has done good things for Cuba.”
3
Thus is their desperation to escape from Bonnie Raitt’s “happy little island.” And these were but a fraction of those clamoring to flee.
“We emphasize the importance of maintaining sanctions. Sanctions were imposed to help us end the apartheid system. It is only logical that we must continue to apply this form of pressure against the South African government.”
4
That’s Nelson Mandela addressing (and thanking) the Canadian parliament in June 1990 for imposing and championing economic sanctions against South Africa. Yet need I mention that for more than forty years Canada has been Castro’s most generous business partner? Need I mention how Canada consistently bashes the United States for its “counterproductive” policy of sanctions against Cuba?
“Sanctions which punish Cuba are anathema to the international order to which we aspire.” That’s Nelson Mandela in September 1998 while decorating Fidel Castro with the “Order of Good Hope,” South Africa’s highest civilian award. Yet probably no world figure is more associated with economic sanctions than Nelson Mandela.
“For a long time our country stood alone on applying sanctions to South Africa. Ultimately, we were on the right side of history.” That’s Democratic senator Chris Dodd praising sanctions. “U.S. sanctions against Cuba can only be thought of as bullying tactics by the world’s strongest superpower against a small nation.” That’s Senator Dodd speaking at the National Press Club in September 2002.
“There is no acceptable justification for the trade embargo or the diplomatic isolation of Cuba,” writes former senator George McGovern. “The economic boycott of Cuba is a failure.” For thirty years he’s been banging the drums against it. He includes, of course, the obligatory dismissal of those who fled Castro’s tyranny: “I wouldn’t let a handful of noisy Cuban exiles in south Florida dictate
our
Cuba policy.”
5
(Emphasis mine.)
By the way, notice McGovern’s use of “our.” Call me overly sensitive, but he seems to imply that those “noisy Cuban exiles” (United States citizens like me) don’t qualify as gen-you-wine Americans. Imagine the repercussions, the media and Democratic caterwauling, if, say, Trent Lott or Tom DeLay expressed similar sentiments about any other ethnic group in America.
George McGovern—a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner (awarded by Bill Clinton)—is a longtime fan of the great Fidel. McGovern says his frequent Cuban host is “very shy, sensitive, witty.... I frankly liked him.”
6
The Cuban Maximum Leader first hosted his American admirer in 1975. In May 1977, the bedazzled McGovern wrote a travelogue of his visit in—where else?—the
New York Times
. Fidel took McGovern on an “impromptu” jeep ride into the countryside. Occasionally they stopped. “Everywhere we were surrounded by laughing children who obviously loved Fidel Castro!” wrote the rapt gentleman from South Dakota.
7
Alas, McGovern’s visit also had a practical and humanitarian purpose. “In my pocket,” wrote McGovern, “I carried a letter from the Boston Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant requesting that his parents be permitted to leave Havana to see him play in Boston. . . . Castro assured me this could be arranged,” gushed McGovern.
8
How touching. Some people might have asked themselves: What’s wrong with this picture? Why should a “president” decide whether Luis Tiant’s parents travel to see their son pitch in the United States? And why should I be praising one who does?
Today, McGovern tells us that economic sanctions are “unjustifiable” and “always fail.” Fine, let’s rewind to
your own
congressional voting record in the late 1970s, senator. Let’s stop on your views regarding Rhodesia, Chile, and Nicaragua. Very interesting indeed. Turns out, sir, that you thundered to impose sanctions against all three.
Liberal Democrats, it turns out are a lot like the Hollywood (and music industry) Left when it comes to double standards about Cuba.
Carole King sang her little heart out for John Kerry during campaign fund-raisers in 2004. Bonnie Raitt did too, after her first choice, Howard Dean, went screaming out of the primaries. Both Carole and Bonnie have also proudly played in Castro’s Cuba. Carole went in February 2002 and serenaded the Maximum Leader with a heartfelt “You’ve Got a Friend.” Bonnie Raitt visited in March 1999 and stopped hyperventilating just long enough to compose a song in Castro’s honor, “Cuba Is Way Too Cool!” Among the lyrics: “It’s just a happy little island!” and “Big bad wolf [that’s us, folks, the United States] you look the fool!”
9
With Woody Harrelson gyrating beside her, the rapidly oxidizing chanteuse—she of the big red hair and the famous gray roots—rasped out her ditty at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater. The occasion was “Music Bridges Over Troubled Waters” back in March 1999.
“Rock Against Freedom” sounds much better to me. A beaming Jimmy Buffet came on after Bonnie. Then came Joan Osborne, REM’s Peter Buck, and former Police-men Andy Summers and Stuart Copeland. In between crooning and strumming, these cheeky free spirits all dutifully recited their scripts against the “embargo.” (How did Jackson Browne miss this?) Against South Africa a decade earlier, of course, their script called for an embargo. “I Ain’t Gonna Play Sun City!” shouted Bonnie Raitt herself, alongside Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Darryl Hall, and scores of similar political imbeciles on the 1985 recording titled “Artists United Against Apartheid.”
Frank Sinatra, Rod Stewart, and Julio Iglesias all caught hell from their industry peers for a gig at South Africa’s Sun City resort in 1984. These entertainers’ crime was daring to march out of step with the glitterati’s buffooneries and hypocrisies. Because the fact is that their Sun City gig was at a privately owned and
unsegregated
resort. But that was different: South Africa wasn’t Communist, and the glitterati prefer Communists.
Most of the five thousand clapping Cubans in the audience were Cuban Communist Party members and their families. And, of course, these pop stars will gladly play in Havana’s Karl Marx Theater. They’ll gladly entertain an audience dedicated to the most murderous ideology in human history. According to researcher Dr. Armando Lago, many in Bonnie Raitt’s and Jimmy Buffet’s
very audience
had a hand in 110,000 political murders of their own. Maybe these musical hipsters didn’t know that, or know that Castro’s Cuba has the highest emigration, incarceration, and suicide rates for young people on the face of the globe.
When Cuba’s overall suicide rate reached twenty-four per thousand in 1986, it was
double
Latin America’s average and
triple
Cuba’s pre-Castro rate. Cuban women are now
the most suicidal in the world
, making death by suicide
the primary cause of death for Cubans aged fifteen to forty-eight
. The statistics got so embarrassing that the Cuban government ceased publishing them; they are now state secrets. But we also know that Cuba has the highest (or third highest; the sources differ) abortion rate in the world. The suicide and abortion rates smack of hopelessness and despair.
10
And while Jimmy Buffet and Bonnie Raitt proudly sing to the Communist regime, I wonder if they know that owning a Beatles or Rolling Stones record in Cuba was a criminal offense or that effeminate behavior, or wearing blue jeans, or being a man with long hair meant the secret police could dump you in a concentration camp with WORK WILL MAKE MEN OUT OF YOU posted in bold letters above the gate and machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG.
11
But the conditions were identical. Like Margaritaville, there’s a lot of “wasting away” in Cuba, but it happens behind barbed wire and from slave labor, disease, malnutrition, beatings, and torture.
After their performance for Castro’s toadies, the rockers and hipsters were invited to a private reception to meet Fidel himself. Knees weakened, mouths gaped, hearts fluttered, skin tingled, mass incontinence threatened. “We completely lost our composure,” squealed English songstress Ruth Merry. “As we lined up, an excited Andy Summers of the Police stood next to me with his copy of Castro’s
History Will Absolve Me
. Andy was nervously contemplating asking Castro to sign it—but he finally did! . . . Here were all these huge stars, quaking with anticipation! . . . I lost any composure and degenerated into a heap of nervous giggling for the rest of the evening!”
12
I’m losing my composure too, Ruthie dear.
“Castro was very gracious,” said a Mr. Cripps of a group named Combo Bravo. “He was dressed in a suit and tie!” “Castro and Mr. Cripps spoke for a few minutes through a translator, and another man was present who knew just about everything there was to know about all of us. A detail of Cuban intelligence that Mr. Cripps found eerie,” noted one of the news reports. “Eerie,” Mr. Cripps? Let me assure you, sir, if you
lived
in Cuba this minor detail would provide more than a vicarious little jolt.
And you know how rockers and hipsters are always big on wearing red ribbons to show how much they care about AIDS? Well, Castro’s Cuba cares too. His regime banishes AIDS patients to “sanatoriums” in the countryside, where they are basically left alone to die. “Left alone” is the key phrase here. Think about it, in the words of Kris Kristofferson himself, “Freedom’s just another word for”
being left alone.
Or so it seemed to some of Castro’s subjects. Word got around. “You mean no secret police constantly snooping over my shoulder? You mean no waving a stupid little flag for hours in the plaza while the Maximum Gasbag spouts his idiocies? You mean, I can say what I want? Read what I want?” AIDS suddenly became a disease of choice in Cuba.
In a film titled
Cursed Be Your Name
,
Liberty
, Cuban exile Vladimir Ceballos exposes this grim and almost inconceivable episode. Back in the 1980s, young people in Cuba who listened (or tried to listen) to American rock music—to Bonnie Raitt, Carole King, and Jimmy Buffet—were called
roqueros
and were special targets of the police. They were constantly harassed, beaten, and jailed. Ceballos’s film documents how more than one hundred of these
roqueros
deliberately injected themselves with the AIDS virus.
It sounds stupid, crazy, and horrible, I agree. But to these people, banishment to AIDS sanatoriums was a taste of freedom. One scene shows a
roquero
AIDS victim holding a small, crumpled American flag. With trembling hands, he scrubs it clean, then drapes it slowly across his emaciated chest. This man preferred death by inches, a lingering death of suppurating sores, constant pain, and eventual dementia to living under the rule of the man Carole King warmly serenaded with “You’ve Got a Friend.” He gave himself AIDS because it bought him a few years of life in the equivalent of a U.S. federal prison. On Bonnie Raitt’s “happy little island,” he reckoned this as freedom.