Christian Gonzalez/Staff Writer
It took about twenty minutes from the second I received a text that read “Fidel is dead,” to grab the customary pots and pans, and violate quite a few traffic rules to arrive at the Versailles restaurant with my friends. We watched as the crowd swelled with new arrivals—people waving the Cuban flag, honking their car horns, chanting demands for a Cuba free from despotism and destitution.
Odious though Fidel Castro was, something clawed at my conscience as I joined in the general elation. Is it right to savor the death of a human being, even one personally responsible for mass torture, agony and death? I don’t know; that question is best left for the reader to answer.
A far better question to ponder is this: why is it that Castro’s passing compelled thousands of Miamians to leave their beds at such an ungodly hour of the night to go and share in the collective excitement of the Cuban exile community?
Smiles were all I saw around Versailles. Elderly people drove past the restaurant and waved their hands. Younger couples embraced each other. Most recorded the event from their mobile devices. But the pulse the crowd emitted was not merely one of happiness but of relief.
I thought immediately of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In “The Gulag Archipelago,” Solzhenitsyn painstakingly detailed the violence that the Stalinist state apparatus inflicted on its citizenry, from the beginning of the filthy process to its bitter end. That book was published in 1973.
Most people of polite opinion already knew of the atrocities committed in Stalin’s Russia, but, as George Orwell (who must be quoted in any discussion of totalitarianism) wrote in “1984,” sometimes “The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”
By exposing the gulags for what they were —death camps— Solzhenitsyn accomplished the important task of clearing what remained in the way of intellectual justification for the Soviet regime. Those for whom slave labor, systemic sexual assaults on women, mass murder and starvation were matters of little concern (I refer here to people like George Bernard Shaw and Jean-Paul Sartre) were exposed as frauds.
Solzhenitsyn wrote from experience; he was personally sent to the archipelago and was only given back his freedom a few weeks before Stalin died.
Upon hearing a loudspeaker announce the tyrant’s death, he wrote “This was the moment my friends and I had looked forward to even in our student days… He’s dead, the Asiatic dictator is dead! The villain has curled up and died! I could have howled with joy there by the loudspeaker; I could even have danced a wild jig.”
He didn’t dance, nor could he have, for, after all, Solzhenitsyn still lived in Soviet Russia.
But with Castro’s death, the Cubans living in Miami could indeed dance, kiss, cheer, and clank their pots and pans; not so for the Cubans still on the island.
Some leftists have taken this occasion to remind us about the alleged wonders of Cuba’s health care system. Others praised Castro’s investments in education. And, we are told, American imperialism has a long and shameful history in Cuba, from the Platt Amendment to the Bay of Pigs.
I suppose now is as good a time as ever to revisit these incidents, even though the relevance of William McKinley’s foreign policy in judging Castro’s legacy is not immediately clear to me. Resurfacing these matters seems more like a way to divert away attention from the enormous failures of Castro’s revolution.
But, at any rate, I wish to return to the question with which I began: Cubans celebrated to demonstrate not just happiness but relief at their oppressor’s passing. Sixty years of single-party rule has left thousands dead, hundreds of thousands imprisoned, millions exiled in Miami and elsewhere—all this and an island that is still mired in misery and poverty.
Some say that at least Cuba has a “superb” health care system to show for this pain. But for the Cubans who know better, for the Cubans who poured into Miami’s streets, we should feel nothing but empathy and solidarity.
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