[ April 25, 2024 ]
Fidel Castro is finally dead, and the old despot has left us with a parting gift: another demonstration of just how out of touch the American Left really is.
Barack Obama affected a tone of exquisite sensitivity: “We know that this moment fills Cubans – in Cuba and in the United States – with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.”
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Obama’s statement was carefully neutral: how exactly history would judge Castro, and whether he altered lives, families, and the Cuban nation for good or ill, he did not say. John Kerry was likewise reasonably measured in tone, writing of Castro and Cubans: “Over more than half a century, he played an outsized role in their lives, and he influenced the direction of regional, even global affairs.”
An outsized role for good or ill? Kerry didn’t say, either. But given the grief of other Leftist leaders, it’s likely they were restraining their affection and respect for Castro for fear of offending the sensibilities of Americans (particularly Cuban-Americans) who didn’t love him quite so much. But other Leftist leaders were not so circumspect: “In many ways,” Jesse Jackson wrote, “after 1959, the oppressed the world over joined Castro’s cause of fighting for freedom & liberation-he changed the world. RIP.” Nancy Pelosi lamented: “Fidel Castro’s death marks the end of an era. We will continue to press for the dreams of the Cuban people.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hailed Castro as a “legendary revolutionary.” Jimmy Carter sounded a personal note, noting that he and Rosalynn “remember fondly our visits with him in Cuba and his love of his country.” Pope Francis called Castro’s death “sad news” and addressed the Cuban people: “I express to you my sentiments of grief.”
Exactly what was wrong with all these statements becomes clear in light of the revels in Miami, as Cuban exiles celebrated the death of the man who had destroyed the lives of so many Cubans. They don’t think Castro was a great man, or someone who had worked for the dreams of the Cuban people, and they detested his “outsized role in their lives.” One Cuban émigré declared: “Him dying represents the end of something awful that happened to us. It’s actually him — not anybody else — who caused this. It’s because of him that we lost our opportunity to have a life in our country.” Another added: “He died, but his brother is still there, the government is still there, it’s still the oppressive government.”
The Cubans in Miami should have been pleased with the statements of President-elect Donald Trump. Trump called Castro “a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades” and noted that his legacy was “one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.”
Trump added: “While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve. Through the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.”
Trump and those who are celebrating in Miami know what Fidel Castro really was, and what he actually did and represented. The Leftist intelligentsia, by contrast, is once again tone-deaf and unseemly in its regard for authoritarians, totalitarians, oppressors, and dictatorial butchers. It is fitting, in a certain sense, that Castro has died before Trump actually takes office: his death represents, like the defeat of Hillary Clinton (barring recount chicanery that lands her in the White House after all), the end of an era. The Leftist hegemony over American culture, and its self-appointed role as the guardian of acceptable opinion, is crumbling.
It doesn’t matter how many times Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson and the like tell us that Fidel Castro was a towering figure of history: we agree already that he will be remembered, but he will be remembered for the bloodthirsty tyrant he was. But increasing numbers of the American people no longer believe that such people and other Leftist icons have any moral authority to tell us about anything, just as so many Cubans have for decades seen through Castro’s Communist pieties. Reality cannot be forcibly suppressed forever, no matter how fine the words are that try to distract us away from seeing it. The people celebrating in Miami this weekend, and the election of Donald Trump, are indications of that.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and author of the New York Times bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
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37 Comments
7 years ago
The biggest supporters of Castro are rich leftist hypocrites.
7 years ago
Reply to
roccolore
Agreed, and who have never visited his country for a dose of reality.
7 years ago
Another mass-murdering, life-destroying, communist despot has ‘moved on’ to the final judgment: It’s no wonder the Left is distraught. If Castro failed to start as many wars, slaughter as many innocents, and destroy as many lives as other Leftists, it’s only because Ronald Reagan wasn’t letting the Left use American funds to support him, and his primary patron, the USSR, collapsed from trying to compete with America.
How long will it be before Hollyweird creates a Fake Flick extolling Castro’s non-existent virtues and fantasy accomplishments?
May the death of Castro lead to the collapse of his regime and the end of the Cuban nightmare.
7 years ago
And Che Guevara with him.
7 years ago
The left speaks volumes in their stealthy neutral statements.
7 years ago
“…just how out of touch the American Left really is.”
That is the wrong conclusion.
“…just how devoted to evil the American Left really is.”
Fixed. This is the correct and only conclusion.
7 years ago
I had to do wiring work in a CEO’s office of a major US corporation. The office in Minneapolis was being arranged with elaborate and expensive furnishings, and a state of the art sound system I was installing.. On the walls were pictures of Communist dictators, MAO, Castro, Pol Pot, Stalin. Lenin, Karl Marx. I was disgusted.
If this CEO is a Capitalist, why does he worship leaders who don’t allow a wealthy private sector ? So many people become millionaires themselves and then jump up and say how the capitalist system never worked and we need communism…
7 years ago
Reply to
762x51FMJ
Power and wealth, plain and simple. See who Honeywell and 3M support, it will make you sick.
7 years ago
Reply to
762x51FMJ
My guess is they brainwashed in the liberal indoctrination centers, Universities
7 years ago
North Korea is next?
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/565136/north-korea-collapse-kim-jong-un-regime-jang-jin-sung-kim-joo-il
It’s amazing how little the world knows about Castro the despot. Welcome to the dung heap of history.
7 years ago
Reply to
Millionmileman
You can thank the mainstream media for ALWAYS shielding and supporting the socialist and communist monsters in the world. Look at how they lie about the subhuman murderous muslims.
7 years ago
Reply to
Tuci78
Right now Jill Stein has invaded the Cheddar Curtain but she will be repulsed by Wisconsin’s seasoned, Republican Guard.
7 years ago
Free Cuba, naval blockade.
7 years ago
The good die young, Castro was not young, now he will not get any older, like the thousands of people he executed as a lesson to those he allowed to live in fear of his form of communism.
7 years ago
And then we have ..Turdeau… traitor PM of Canada putting that murderous dictator on a pedestal.
Gawd,..what a disgrace for Canada that moron is…
7 years ago
COULD IT BE THAT THE SHOCK AND AWE OF TRUMP’S ELECTION
so traumatized the frail, weak, sick Cuban dictator that it shattered his fragile health and killed him?
Click http://www.apollospeaks.com and judge for yourself.
7 years ago
Know the democrats by their friends and heroes.
The people infesting the White House have, since 2008, professed a love for Castro, Mao and others of their ilk. How the people living under these murderous tyrants (past and present) were living in nirvana. Rat obama’s cabinet had called for a socialist America for the nirvana to be here, too.
It is gratifying to see the anti-American democrats weeping like spoiled school girls. Hopefully, some of the socialist democrats will be so inconsolable that they will choose to join Fidel.
7 years ago
Castro wanted and get german SS SOLDIERS!
Big german Newspaper wrote that the german secret service knew it from 1962.
Also he wanted to buy 4000 MPs from german Rigthwing Extremists who where big in gun smuggling.
7 years ago
Castro allowed the ussr to threaten the whole of North America with nuclear missiles.
When dealing with the Cubans we should remember that.
7 years ago
Have these people who are idolizing Castro forgotten that during the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962) he was privately urging Khrushchev to launch a nuclear strike on the United States? Have they forgotten that while Kennedy was trying to tamp down the crisis–the closest the world has come to nuclear war–this true-believing Marxist was willing to play Samson in the Temple, and create a situation in which the major cities of both superpowers would have been destroyed? And he’s now considered (or at least remembered) by some as a heroic icon of change? Sorry, but not in my view.
7 years ago
Obhammud and Kerry were trying to console those individuals of sound mind and body who may be upset at Fidel’s passing, both of them. Did you happen to notice that their remarks regarding the murdering dictator who ended or otherwise ruined thousands of lives and his entire nation were far more complimentary and conciliatory than anything either of them EVER said about the US citizenry?
7 years ago
Worth a look:
Truly an appalling monster!
“The Truth About Fidel Castro | The Cuban Revolution”. (Youtube.)
7 years ago
This gullible Pope Francis called Castro’s death a “sad news”. For whom, the people of Cuba? The catholics around the world? The US? Castro who murdered many people during his time in power, had no right to peacefully die in his bed at age 90. He betrayed the cuban people, because before establishing himself firmly in power, he had promised that he was seeking parliamentary democracy and that he had never been a communist. Once in power he outed himself a marxist-leniniste, and he, his party and his brother are oppressing the cuban people to this day.
Like i said, the death of a murderous tyrant isn’t “sad news” for anyone!
During the crisis of 1962 he urged the Soviet Union to shoot A-Bombs, as many as they have, on the US.
This man is dead and it is a good thing that he is dead!
7 years ago
The big T’s statement was far closer to the truth. Obama’s pathetic ‘opening’ of Cuba has not closed any torture chambers. The left never seem to notice how people have desperately tried even at the cost of their lives to escape from these Communist ‘utopias’
7 years ago
Thus also proving that the POTUS-Elect has his head screwed on straight …
7 years ago
Obama’s remarks, coming from a presumed American president, about Castro’s place in our world, will always be deemed by many of us as disgusting and revealing.
7 years ago
Let’s hope the murdering Commie thug is barking in Hell alongside his former Comrade, Che.
I suppose that statement makes me a Commieaphobist. Oh, well.
7 years ago
The left has shown its true colors-dedicated marxists bent on imposing the communist insanity on the world at all costs. Most of these idiots could not even survive under a collectivist system and the rich ones would lose all their money. The first time they open their big mouths to protest, off to jail they go. Send them to Venezuela so they can experience what communism really is. And take some food and toilet paper with you!
7 years ago
We can see the difference between, the leftist loonies, including obummer, the real commie, and the persecuted people who ACTUALLY suffered under this mainic regime. The Dissidents in miami, were dancing in the streets, while the left was hailing this nutcase
7 years ago
Castro always looked as if he was constipated.
7 years ago
That looks like a silk workingman’s party green shirt he was wearing.
7 years ago
What’s the difference between Jill Steiner and a watermelon?
