September 10, 2005
Thugabe shows up to see castro
It's absolutely despicable. You don't like to think Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe has friends of any kind, anywhere, anytime, anyhow. But he does - the Monster At Our Gate - a dictator whose brutality matches his own. They are coevals.
So today castro and his minions warmly welcomed Robert Mugabe, meeting the dead-eyed barbarian at Havana airport.
Mugabe, you recall, has just finished with his 'Drive Out Trash' program against Zimbabwe's shantytowns. These shantytowns were created when Thugabe took over the productive white-owned farms in Africa's Breadbasket and handed them over to his ignorant cronies who promptly turned them into wastelands.
The shantytowns that followed were created by innocent black Zimbabwean farmworkers who were driven off the lands by the confiscations and forced to fend for themselves alone in the cities. Their pitiful homes are now destroyed because they oppose Mugabe, won't vote for him, and for that Mugabe wants to kill them. He's taken away everything they ever had and burned it to the ground. And left them in the wilderness, starving. This dictator needs an especially deep fire-roasting pit to burn in in hell.
But right now, he's got a friend. The Beast of Havana sees his mirror image in Mugabe.
And what did these two monsters discuss? Well, it seems that Mugabe's about to get booted out of the U.S.-financed IMF, something that should have happened years ago. He inexplicably got a 6-month-deferment and now is in Havana to plead for them not to cut him off entirely.
He has a funny way of doing it, though. To persuade the IMF to keep his country in its money-shovelling program, he says this:
"IMF is almost never a real assistance to developing countries," Mugabe said after arriving on the communist-run island, which voluntarily withdrew its involvement with the IMF many years ago.
The international lending organization is "willed by the big powers which dictate what it should do," Mugabe told reporters. "We have never been friends of the IMF and in the future we will never be friends of the IMF."
Mugabe said he was looking forward to meeting with his ally and "brother," President fidel castro, after Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque greeted him at the airport. It is Mugabe's ninth visit to the island since 1978.
And to stay in the IMF, Mugabe picked a funny choice of places. castro was booted out of the IMF years ago for stealing. Unlike the statement of this link here, he didn't go voluntarily - he was asked to leave. He can call that a voluntary exit, but we all know the real story. castro is a known defaulter, chiseller, thief and sponger in the international financial community. He confiscated private property, which serves as his example for Mugabe's development. He's a bad credit risk. He runs out on his tab.
And castro's made it his mission to urge Latin America to default on all their debts as he did, so that they can all be losers together. When he was bellowing the loudest to do it back in 1998, most Latam countries considered the 'let's-all-default' idea - and then noticed that castro was quietly paying his bills and suppliers under the table just as he was telling them not to. That didn't do too much for his credibility.
So now castro's got a willing sucker who both wants to be in the IMF and cordially wants the right to screw them by defaulting. It's so very castro. Let's hope something very bad happens.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Arguing!
UPDATE: KillCastro has more analysis of this Mugabe-castro scam, along with a truly ugly picture of that pair here.
Posted by Mora at September 10, 2005 08:00 PM
Comments
One of the few like-minded individuals fidel can call a "buddy" -- not surprising.
Posted by: George L. Moneo at September 10, 2005 08:41 PM
The good thing about African dictators is that they usually meet very grisly ends. Samuel Doe, the dictator of Liberia, was turned into puzzle pieces by a chainsaw. His predecessor was eviscerated (had his entrails pulled out). Well, it's dinner time, so I won't continue this litany. Of course, as inevitably happens, the worst monster of them all, Idi Amin (who used to eat his opponents) died in bed.
Posted by: M.A.T. at September 10, 2005 08:56 PM
Except for Charles Taylor, who's apparently alive and kicking it in exile after trashing liberia.
Posted by: bryan at September 10, 2005 09:21 PM
Didn't one of them get his ear chawed off by one of his successors, some guy by the name of Johnson?
Posted by: A.M. Mora y Leon at September 10, 2005 10:13 PM
Shame on all of us for interpreting these acts of individual and collective expression from a eurocentric viewpoint rather than from a culturally-sensitive perspective that avoids reflexive condemnations of historically-charged events that take place within the mainstream of civilized behavior in Mother Africa. Eating one's enemies is an ancient practice that is believed to invigorate the warrior by the assimilation of his opponent's spirit and other attributes. It is simply just another kind of war booty: to the winner belongs the spoils (and he better eat them before they really get spoilt).
[Needless to say--or, rather, I really must say it--this is an example of PC thought as regards Africa and the Africans, not the expression of my own views on the subject.]
Posted by: M.A.T. at September 10, 2005 11:02 PM
I'd like to know how many people castro's eaten. He does all that weird stuff with chicken feathers in his hotel rooms he trashes when he's abroad. God knows what else he does.
Posted by: A.M. Mora y Leon at September 11, 2005 12:49 AM
Mora,
I appreciate the link back, but feel I must add that my blog is Arguing with Signposts.
There is actually an Australian blog called Signposts, and while they are friends of mine, I don't really know what they think of Thugabe.
:-)
Posted by: bryan at September 11, 2005 01:01 AM
Val, you are forgetting Thugabe is also a good friend of Chavez as well, not only Cagastro's (surprising, isn't it?). Well, we can see that the three of them come from the same latrine.
Posted by: K-2 at September 12, 2005 12:44 PM