Havana's Darling Dictator

Late last month, a Cuban legislative panel officially jettisoned the Varela Project, an initiative spearheaded by dissidents seeking a referendum on political and economic reform within the island’s Communist framework. A clause in the regime’s constitution purportedly allows citizens to organize a national referendum if they can gather 10,000 signatures, and Cuba’s opposition leaders had been able to collect over 11,000 for the Varela petition, which they presented to the National Assembly in May 2002. Unfortunately, the dissident project now appears to have suffered the same fate as so many other challenges to Fidel Castro’s repressive reign. The shelving of the petition roughly coincided with the debut of Oliver Stone’s fawning documentary of Cuba’s 76-year-old ruler at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. A revolting bit of irony, to be sure, but one that supporters of Cuban freedom have sadly come to expect.

The international human rights lobby, which lodged a series of hysterical protests over the supposedly inhumane treatment of captured Taliban and al Qaeda fighters at Guantanamo Bay, has long been reluctant to condemn the denial of personal liberties in Castro’s prison-state. Many activists still cling to the myth of Cuba as a “workers’ paradise,” and thus cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the realities of state-sponsored murder, torture and persecution that have typified life for Cuban dissidents since the revolution in 1959. An unfortunately large group of Western liberals, moreover, seem captivated by stories of literacy programs and socialized medicine. Consequently, they choose to overlook or excuse Castro’s monumental human rights abuses.

Some celebrities in the West have gone a step further, elevating Castro to an almost mythical status. In recent years, a parade of American movie stars has visited the island gulag to mug with its Communist bully. Danny Glover, Kevin Costner, Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio and Steven Spielberg have all made pilgrimages southward to express their groupie-like adoration for Castro. Costner said watching the premiere of his film “Thirteen Days” with the despot was “the experience of a lifetime,” while Spielberg called his November 2002 dinner with Castro “the eight most important hours of my life.” To these Hollywood icons, the Cuban leader is a veritable rock star.

Stone appears to be similarly enthralled with Havana’s darling dictator. His documentary film, entitled “Comandante,” is filled with toadying pro-Castro drivel. Stone spent some 30 hours with the Communist tyrant last February, and the movie represents a compilation of those interviews. To say that the director lobbed him a series of softball questions would be a gross understatement. In fact, before Stone was even allowed to begin taping, Castro reportedly demanded the right to reject any questions he didn’t find acceptable. Also, he was allowed to order the filming stopped at any point he wished. Though Castro apparently never exercised either of these rights (what does that say about Stone’s questions?), it is very telling that Stone and his producers were willing to accommodate so many stipulations. They seemed perfectly willing to act as useful propaganda tools for the Communist regime. At one point in “Comandante,” for example, Castro wonders aloud: “What is a dictator? Is it bad to be a dictator? The United States has been a great friend of dictators.” He then adds that he is merely “a dictator of myself.”

Of course, this shouldn’t necessarily be surprising; Stone is infamous for using his films to suggest that free and unfree societies are morally equivalent. Indeed, he offered this assessment of Castro to a journalist at Sundance: “He’s a very driven man, a very moral man. He’s very concerned about his country. He’s selfless in that way.” That’s about as concise a piece of moral equivocating as you’re ever going to find.

During the Cold War, Soviet apparatchiks commonly referred to those Western journalists who naively accepted the Kremlin’s misinformation as “useful idiots.” The phrase could easily be used to characterize people such as Stone, who willfully enable a totalitarian government to subjugate its people and escape even the mildest of rebukes from the international community. Perhaps someday when Castro is gone and Cuba’s Communist archives are made available to the public, his sympathizers in the West will at last recognize the abject folly of their delusion. For the time being, however, proponents of Cuban freedom must not simply accept Castro’s tyranny as a normal state of affairs that cannot be changed—even though resigned complacency is the attitude that far too many Americans currently have toward Cuba.

To that end, if the Bush administration is serious about affecting real reforms on the island, it should highlight the imprisonment of noted Cuban dissidents the way Western activists did Nelson Mandela’s Apartheid-era jailing in South Africa. One name to start with—a name that a majority of Americans, and many Cubans, for that matter, are probably unaware of—is Francisco Chaviano Gonzalez. He has endured almost nine years of torture in the Combinado del Este prison for publicly attacking Castro on Cuban human rights violations. But Chaviano is only one of some 240 estimated political prisoners who are being held in Castro’s jails. Meanwhile, their families are subjected to constant harassment and intimidation.

Reminding everyone of these crimes is the only way to combat the whitewashing of Castro’s brutality by useful idiots like Stone. Communist dictatorships, after all, can only survive in an environment of lies and distortions. The Cuban regime cannot withstand the truth.

Duncan M. Currie ’04 is a history concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.