Richard Cohen Reminds the Left Why Castro Must Go

(Washington, D.C.): Although the Washington Post Writer’s Group describes its columnist Richard Cohen as “a stylish writer who leans to the Left,” in a recent essay Mr. Cohen broke with all the other writers, actors, directors, academics and intellectuals who frequently confuse being leftist with being stylish. On 20 March, he courageously condemned one of the most opprobrious – – yet all-too-common — examples of this phenomenon: the politically correct adulation paid by the Left to Fidel Castro.

The most recent outbreak of such fatuousness occurred at last weekend’s “Bay of Pigs” conference in Havana where pro-Fidel Americans and Cuban participants on both sides of the abortive invasion compared notes and formerly classified government documents for the purpose of trumpeting Castro’s genius and vilifying America.

For example, the New York Times reporter on the scene, Tim Weiner, disclosed breathlessly that the CIA had developed “a propaganda plan” before the Bay of Pigs. For its part, National Public Radio reported from the conference that Fidel is “that Energizer bunny of Communism” who “continues to be a stone in the shoe of American policymakers.” NPR then went utterly over the top: “Mr. Castro’s participation in the conference and his modest nod to more open government have to be viewed positively, because 40 years of Mr. Castro’s intransigence and unimaginative American policy have meant that the Cuban people are missing a party….” Unmentioned is what they have gotten instead: a totalitarian hell that Castro has created and maintained since he took power in Cuba.

This sort of behavior prompted Richard Cohen to remark that, “Castro’s one clear success has been his incredible ability to charm left-leaning intellectuals.” Cohen rightly observes that any Cuban writer doing what Cohen does pointing out the truth as he sees it on any number of subjects “would end up in prison, or worse.”

President Bush clearly appreciates the true character of the Castro regime and, as in so many other areas, is determined to take a different approach from that pursued by his predecessor – – who was intent on normalizing relations with Fidel. This is especially evident in his excellent choice of Otto J. Reich for the position of Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Amb. Reich was born in Cuba, emigrated to the United States one year after Castro assumed power and served as the U.S. ambassador to Venezuela from 1986 to 1989. He was also director of the Center for a Free Cuba, a member of the U.S.-Cuba Business Council, and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Left has already begun howling about Mr. Bush’s selection of someone determined to help end Castro’s despotic regime and to bring about the final liberation of long-suffering Cuba; Richard Cohen’s essay is a timely reminder of how wrong they are on both counts.

In a letter explaining what he was about to do, the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas wrote that “persons near me are in no way responsible for my decision. There is only one person I hold responsible: Fidel Castro.” With that, he killed himself.
That letter is reprinted at the very end of the paperback version of Arenas’s memoir, “Before Night Falls,” which has become a movie. Its star, Javier Bardem, is up for an Academy Award for his astonishing portrayal of Arenas, but the movie itself has not been nominated. I can imagine no explanation for this. It is an incredible film.

It is also a timely and, therefore, deeply ironic film. At the moment, Cuba is undergoing something of a rehabilitation. Bergdorf Goodman’s spring catalogue was shot in Cuba. The Writers Guild, the union for screenwriters, sent a delegation to last December’s Havana Film Festival and reported back that the question of artistic freedom there is “open to debate.” A delegation of Hollywood executives recently met with Castro and came away, as is almost always the case, deeply impressed.

Castro’s one clear success has been his incredible ability to charm left-leaning intellectuals. To their mind, his enemies — the arch anti-Communist Cubans of South Florida and reactionaries in the U.S. Congress — are somehow the real problem. The man himself is sometimes nearly idolized. The writer Philip Weiss, while not altogether uncritical of what he sees in Cuba, nevertheless writes in the March 5 New York Observer, “Fidel’s dedication and vision are staggering.”

That staggering vision includes what Human Rights Watch characterizes as “a highly effective machinery of repression.” It means, among other things, that if I did in Cuba what I do here, I would long ago have been thrown into jail — probably tortured, maybe killed. The government only recently freed the journalist Jesus Joel Diaz Hernandez, who was arrested in 1999 and accused of violating Article 72, a ghastly edict right out of Orwell that forbids “conduct that is in manifest contradiction with the norms of socialist morality.” In other words, anything the state says it is.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least two other reporters remain imprisoned, reportedly in harrowing circumstances. So do other writers, intellectuals, dissidents. The fact remains that Castro runs one of the most repressive regimes in the world. Freedom House rates the regime as repressive as Libya’s or Syria’s and somewhat more repressive than even China’s. Cuba gets a 7.7; China, 7.6.

“Before Night Falls” explains where those numbers come from. Arenas, born so poor he literally ate dirt, joined Castro’s guerrillas as a teenager and wound up in Havana. But he was no ordinary hero of the revolution. Among other things, he was gay — a “social misfit” in the parlance of the regime — and a writer who insisted on having his works published. When they were smuggled out of Cuba and published abroad, Arenas was imprisoned. His account of his time spent in Havana’s medieval El Morro prison is not bedtime reading.

Back to the “irony” that I mentioned before. Castro has always courted the famous — the intellectual, the writer. Arenas himself records the time, just before the 1980 Mariel boat lift, when he watched the Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez applaud a Castro speech. “I will never forget that speech,” he writes. “Castro looked like a cornered, furious rat. Nor will I forget the hypocritical applause of Garcia Marquez.”

Marquez could have neither known nor cared that Arenas was there that day. Arenas was a nobody, and Marquez was world-famous — and justly so, I might add. He was so much like the other famous writers who could not hear the screams from El Morro or notice the secret police everywhere. It was enough that health care was universally available and that, for the most part, Cuba had attained universal equality. Everyone was poor.

Now this obscure writer’s book has been transformed into a brilliant movie by Julian Schnabel, the artist and cinematic dilettante. In box office terms, “Before Night Falls” is a virtual asterisk ($ 3.1 million so far), but it has already reached more people than Arenas ever did, and now the book on which it is based has been re-issued in paperback.

When Arenas killed himself, he was only 47, and Castro was not really the proximate cause of his death. Arenas had left Cuba on the Mariel boat lift and had been living in New York. He was dying of AIDS — and also of El Morro prison: the filth, the beatings, the malnutrition, the terror and, later, “the suffering of exile.” He blamed Castro for his death. That was his privilege. Our obligation, though, is different. We must blame Castro for Arenas’s life.