LEFTIST LATIN AMERICA: Waiting for Castro to Die

by Mik Awake

“Fidel Castro, towering icon of the left, perennial thorn in the American side, and Cuba's controversial dictator for the past 47 years, has died in his sleep. He was 79.”

Inevitably, one day, you will stoop over in your doorway, or open your browser to the online news source of your choosing, and you will read this on the front page. And after the pundits have taken their posthumous potshots, after the conspiracy theorists have tired of invoking the C.I.A. (and Nostradamus?), and long after Cuban exiles everywhere have taken a break from the rumba party to end all rumba parties, someone will have to try to make sense of him: the most influential leftist leader to grace the world stage since the end of World War II.

Ever since Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and the guerillas descended from the Sierra Maestra mountains and ousted Batista, a myth was born in the psyche of the American left, and its fascination with Cuba has not let up. The myth, essentially, revolves around the ideal of the rugged, passionate revolutionary who confronts the evil empire and wins by dint of his passion for the people. The myth can be said to persist through a series of pop cultural artifacts, t-shirts, tattoos, and films, such as "The Motorcycle Diaries" and Woody Allen's brilliant "Bananas."

Though the seeds of the myth were planted in good soil, a strange fruit has since grown in Cuba. As we find ourselves now in the year 2006, it is painfully clear to see that support for Castro – and the perpetuation of his myth as a freedom fighter and champion of social welfare – has done nothing but damage to the the American left.

For all the attention paid to Castro’s foreign policy, so often we overlook his impact in Cuba. And there is no better barometer of his failure as a leader than the Cuban exiles. The exiles now living in America left Cuba in waves. By measuring these waves, one can get a sense not only of the tightening stranglehold of the embargo, but also of Castro's deepening authoritarianism.

What we can deduce from this, namely, is that, progressively, those who were Castro sympathizers, members of the Cuban intelligentsia for example, invariably found life in their country more and more unlivable.

More than the Elian Gonzales fiasco under Clinton, it is liberal support for Castro that has alienated a generation of Cuban exiles. This might not seem so important at first glance, but it is hard to imagine Florida as a Republican stronghold, as a state where Jeb Bush can be governor, without the strength of the Cuban vote, which is decidedly Republican. Furthermore, who is to say that George W. Bush would have won Florida in 2000 were it not for the overwhelming majority of Cuban exiles - and their children - who, prodded by conservative politicians, remain resentful of liberal support for Castro?

If we can agree on anything, we can perhaps agree that Fidel Castro's defiance is a relic of a bygone era, that the capitalist world machine has left him in the dust, and that, evidenced by his human rights abuses and the aforementioned waves of exiles, his failure to play in the world state economically hasn’t been balanced by his ideology. China continues to segue out of the Cold War; why hasn't Cuba?

In a few weeks, Castro will turn 80. And as the world waits for Fidel to die, his reign seems as though it will end with a whimper. Castro’s death will most likely not be the cataclysm everyone expects it to be. All signs indicate that his brother Raul, four years his junior, “is being groomed” to succeed him, thus ensuring another few years of more of the same.

But more than Fidel himself, it is the myth of defiant leftist he has planted in the minds of a new generation of progressives that must die – in America and in Cuba.

(TV image from flickr and Life cover from Wikipedia.)

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