Cuba was a nation of 7 million people when Fidel Castro took it over on New Year’s Eve 1960, and with a tiny economy—although its economy was one of the strongest in Latin America. So why did this tin-pot totalitarian become one of the most important, most destructive, and most evil leaders in the world for more than half a century?
Cuba mattered or two reasons. First, it emerged in the first year of Castro’s reign that Cuba was a client state of the Soviet Union and, since it sat 90 miles from Miami, an island of casinos and sugar suddenly posed both a tactical and strategic military risk to the continental United States. This wasn’t a matter of paranoid fantasy. It had only been 18 years since the near-destruction of the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, which was American territory but not (obviously) attached to the continent—a wound as fresh, if not fresher given the sheer size of what was to follow, than 9/11 is to us today. More important, the various protocols and theories governing the Atomic/Nuclear Age designed to prevent the outbreak of a hyper-destructive war had yet to harden into place. (To give you one example, the most important early effort to imagine and plan against such a thing, Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, was published after Castro’s takeover in 1960.)The idea of an active enemy whose patron possessed nukes was terrifying, so much so that the inconsequential island became one of the two central foreign-policy concerns of the Kennedy administration and the epicenter of the most confrontational moment between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 45-year history of the Cold War. After Kennedy’s assassination, which was directly related to his Cuba policy, Cuba would never again play so key a role in American life or foreign policy—but Castro himself would serve both as an example for and a tool of the export of communism to the Third World, and a disruptive force throughout the Americas specifically.

Second, Castro mattered because he was an enemy of the United States—and as such quickly became the darling of intellectual and ideological forces in the West who actively wished harm on the United States. In their hunger to celebrate any counterexample to the American experiment, these haters of liberal freedoms turned a blind eye then (and, in the case of British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, continue to turn a blind eye now) to the Gulag nation Castro was systematically constructing. As long as he was a foe of the United States, he was a hero to them.

Their despicable apologetics for totalitarianism will be studied in the future the way bacteria and viruses are studied, to break down their workings and come up with treatments and vaccines to prevent them from ever infecting the world’s body politic again.
As for Castro himself, today is a day to wish devoutly that there is a Hell.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/f...el-castro-rip/

Meanwhile Justin Trudeau issued this strange eulogy :

Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on the death of former Cuban President Fidel Castro | Prime Minister of Canada
If the people of Cuba were free there would be dancing in the streets as you see the free expatriate Cubans do . "Cuba si Castro no !"


https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nat...KwK/story.html

I don't know why you would pick holes in Justin's eulogy. Castro had a special friendship with his father, Trudeau, and met him with his dad when he was very young. Why just not leave this alone and treat it as special the way it was intended to be. Is that any 'skin of your nose' to do that ? We in Canada, have respect for Justin's wishes.

And its only 50 years too late.

His father had a special friendship with a mass murderer . His statement needs to be dissected . I don't know how anyone committed to human rights could mourn his passing . Here are the conservative estimates ..... based onHarvard scholar Armando Lago, in his book 'The Black Book of Communism'(1999).... the deaths of 97,000 persons have been named, each confirmed by at least two sources. Some 30,000 executed by firing squad, 2,000 extra-judicial assassinations, 5,000 deaths in prison due to beating by guards and denial of medical care and 60,000 deaths while trying to escape Cuba by sea. He had a reign of terror over the island for over 50 years . Shame on Trudeau for honoring such a man.

We visit Germany after Hitler, and Russia after Stalin, and China, and ... anywhere but North Korea?
I'd like to visit Cuba. Cuba isn't Fidel or Raoul.
Your piece was well written, however. So half will dance, and half will mourn, and half will do neither. Oops make that thirds.

The emperor's comments were just as clueless as Trudeau's .
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press...g-fidel-castro

As long as the Castro regime runs the country ,tourist money enriches them and does nothing to help the people.

Mostly maybe. Give it time. What do you propose, something like the all US efforts to bring democracy to other dictatorships?

I would link opening up economic opportunities to improvements to human rights. I would do what I could to get the people of Cuba the technological ability to communicate freely ,bypassing the regime's strong censorship . I would make it clear to the regime that there will not be full economic engagement between our countries until there is an independent media ;the right to organize opposition parties leading to free and fair elections ,the freedom of assembly ,and release of political prisoners. Until then ,the people of America will have to find some other beaches to tan on.

Trouble is, we aren't the only country eager - I mean willing - to build in and trade with Cuba. Others already do. Granted they are a lot further away, but look how well our bluff has worked so far. If they decide they don't need us, that's it. I've heard stories just in the last few month, such as American employers there won't even be allowed to do their own hiring.

Now that Castro has gone americans could take a look at how a universal health system might work, but no, it will be ideologically unacceptable to take the advice of a poor neighbour. What is interesting is that a nation can exist without capitalism all you have to forego is new cars and your morning latte and that urge to speak something unspeakable

Cubas Health Care system is NOT what the propaganda portrays it to be... not even close. I know (for the last 29 years) an Italian Doctor who has seen it first hand and it scared him to death.

smoothy Italians are scared of their own shadow, the point being everyone is eligible for medical care, the quality of medical care can be suspect in many parts of the world