Why do so many turn to goo on issue of Castro and Cuba?

Star Tribune
October 2, 2002
Mitchell B. Pearlstein

I guess that settles it for good. Jesse Ventura assures us that Fidel Castro had nothing whatsoever to do with President Kennedy's assassination. What makes Jesse so confident? Because Fidel himself said so, right to the governor's star-struck face, right down there in Havana last week. Who would have thought that our governor spent most of his quality time in Hollywood not with Rambo, but Inspector Clouseau?

"I agree with him," Ventura said of Castro's claim that his government would not have been so crazy as to kill an American president. "Why would they?" he asked rhetorically.

Well, one answer may be that the United States tried to knock off, if not Castro himself, then at least his regime two years earlier at the Bay of Pigs and he wasn't amused. Another answer might be that generalissimos generally aren't sweethearts to begin with.

Personally, I doubt that Castro had anything to do with Kennedy's death. But my reasons, as opposed to Ventura's, have nothing to do with what the world's longest-reigning despot might fashion saying to a celebrity American governor.

What makes so many presumably tough-minded people turn to goo when it comes to Castro and Cuba? Name another world-class tyrant that Jesse -- who modestly admitted to being a "big, powerful presence" himself -- would call "spellbinding"? One hopes the list is short.

A never-was flashback:

"Governor Stassen, how was your meeting with the Fuhrer?"

"Herr Hitler was spellbinding. And by the way, he assures me that those big-fenced in places in Auschwitz and Treblinka are for recycling Coke cans and schnapps bottles, nothing else. Nein."

Castro is no Hitler. But neither has he earned any passes when it comes to his ceaseless assaults on freedom stretching back to the Eisenhower administration. Ronald Reagan never sought to embarrass Mikhail Gorbachev when the two were in public together. But that didn't stop him from proclaiming in Berlin (when the Soviet leader presumably was back in the Kremlin watching on CNN), "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Jesse Ventura is a glib fellow with a gift for a kind of language. He also sees himself as a heavyweight champion of liberty. Perhaps now that he's back in St. Paul, he might consider commenting on what Human Rights Watch (certainly not a right-wing outfit) wrote about Cuba only a few years ago:

After acknowledging that Cuba had been voicing "muffled support for human rights and representative democracy," the rights organization went on to report that the regime in Havana, nevertheless, continued to rely on "political oppression to crush internal opposition"; it refused to release political prisoners; it persisted in blocking human rights monitoring; it continued to create new laws restricting human rights; and it refused to dismantle "oppressive legal structures." The place, in other words, doesn't have an Independence Party, nor is it hospitable to more than one cigar-smoking politician at a time.

The U.S. embargo of Cuba is not nearly the main cause of Cuba's economic black hole. Communism is. But having said all that, I agree with Ventura that the trade ban ought to end. And, yes, it probably would have ended by now if not for a lot of (justifiably) angry Cuban-American voters in Florida.

The embargo is a Cold War vestige. Cuba no longer poses the same threat it once did to other countries in the hemisphere. And if we correctly contend that trading with China is in America's national interest by helping open up that Marxist society, it's impossible to deny similar virtues in trading with Cuba.

Likewise, I'm not particularly bothered that Ventura went to Cuba last week, even over the objections of the Bush brothers. As we have learned in China and what used to be the Soviet Union, person-to-person contacts like these can prove helpful over the long haul. I wouldn't be surprised to learn, for example, that a new generation of American ping-pong players are secretly gearing up for matches in places as unsporting as Pyongyang or Tehran.

But the chances of such extracurricular excursions serving U.S. interests and freedom's good name would seem contingent on someone along on the ride, at some felicitous point, speaking hard truth to ugly power. Something along the lines of, "The emperor has no clothes, and what he is wearing is beyond fatigued."

Another reason for bluntness in the case at hand would be to help gargle away some of the bad taste caused by an American governor gushing: "I never dreamed I would have an hour seated side by side with Fidel Castro."

-- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis.