Wednesday, December 07, 2016

Imagining a Perfect Island Paradise

So what if Cuba under Castro is a nightmare of totalitarian impoverishment!

At least Cuban of African ancestry are fully equal! Wait. What? It's kind of like Apartheid--or Jim Crow if you prefer--in Cuba under Castro?

Now in the 21st century, it has become all too apparent that the black population is underrepresented at universities and in spheres of economic and political power, and overrepresented in the underground economy, in the criminal sphere and in marginal neighborhoods.

Huh. After more than 50 years of communism, some are way more equal than others? And based on race? I was assured by many on the left that this wasn't possible.

But surely the rainbow flag flies proudly in a country with such a "caring" system? Again, not so much?

It wasn’t long after Castro came to power that police began rounding up gay men. In 1965, the regime established prison work camps known as Military Units to Aid Production (UMAP), into which it deposited homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other “undesirable” elements.

The camps closed but the discrimination and suppression did not.

Well, at least there is free education! Leaving aside the standard communist practice that education is needed so that even the poorest can read the commands of their overlords and leaving aside the reliability of communist statistics, is the marginal superiority of Cuban literacy over other non-communist countries in Latin America been worth the price of poverty and oppression? (See global statistics here.)

All Cuba achieved was to provide Leftists around the globe with a government they could--from afar--claim was superior to their own society in whatever way the particular leftist wished to see.

"Reality-based" community, indeed. I don't want to hear one damn word about Trump's potential for tyranny when I watch them cry over the far-too-late and far-too-peaceful death of that monstrous tyrant Fidel Castro.

Be glad Fidel Castro is dead and hope he is just a good start for his fellow gulag masters. Not every Cuban was lucky enough to put Fidel behind them.

Perhaps Castro's long rule will be a reminder of the old truth that "when you strike a king, kill him" (or my preferred slogan, "when you start to take Vienna, take Vienna" which expresses the same thought), given that we failed to topple him early when it would have prevented a lot of suffering.

But the way America is only sort of opposing Assad in Syria--enough to anger him but not enough to defeat him)--demonstrates that this administration, at least, does not understand that, preferring to let history judge Castro. And judge Assad, too, the way things are going, after that monster dies at a ripe old age peacefully in his bed in Damascus.

No word on the truth of the rumor that Jill Stein is collecting donations to recheck Fidel's ashes to find out if he is really at room temperature.