UK columnist on castro's celebrity admirers

A columnist for the UK's Yorkshire Post named Bernard Dineen writes the following succinct appraisal of celebrities that visit the "worker's paradise" and come back with glowing reports:

I KEEP meeting people returning from holiday in Cuba who say what a wonderful place it is, with happy people, under the benevolent gaze of Fidel Castro. They are not alone.

Naomi Campbell compared him with Nelson Mandela; Jack Nicholson declared Cuba "a paradise"; Steven Spielberg became starry-eyed after meeting the evil dictator. Not to mention Kate Moss.

Only one question need be asked. Can Cubans leave if they want to? If not, it is a prison. Can you set up a political party? A free trade union? Is there freedom of speech? No. But who cares about such things as you relax on a tourist beach (from which ordinary Cubans are barred).

What is it that persuades otherwise intelligent people to fawn on a butcher like Castro, ignoring all the evidence? Amnesty has chronicled the regime's crimes over the years, like the brutal imprisonment of the blind president of the Cuban Human Rights Foundation, who said: "These are catacombs where people scream, but the sound is drowned out by a hermetically sealed door."

Then there was Castro's denunciation of homosexuality as a "bourgeois perversion". Hundreds of gays, including academics and artists, were imprisoned in filthy jails. All without a single peep from the Castro fan club.

He has lasted so long largely because of the misguided US embargo, which enabled him to blame every failure on the wicked Americans. As he disappears from the scene, Cuba may again get a chance of normal life. But prepare yourself for a massed rally of Castro groupies, from Hollywood to Islington, at his state funeral.

Except for the bit about the embargo at the end (how can any embargo cause a leader to be so callous toward his own people?) this guy has it right. Also since we're talking about the embargo, is it the point of this guy and others that without the embargo, suddenly the world would see what it has been blind to before? His own country has no embargo with Cuba and what have the waves of tourists from the UK brought to Cuba? Zilch. If everyone recognizes that the embargo is an excuse used by castro, then why let it detract from the arguments against him. Only an idiot would allow an empty excuse, which he recognizes as an empty excuse, to prevent him from doing the right thing.

Posted by Henry Louis Gomez at December 24, 2007 09:39 AM

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