When news of Fidel Castro’s death broke out, the reaction of the Cuban community was one of elation. Cuban-Americans danced and sang in the streets, celebrating the death of a dictator who had divided their families, forced them into exile and, in many cases, imprisoned and executed some of their closest friends and relatives.
Next door in Canada, however, we saw a different reaction; Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mourned Castro’s death, praising him as a “remarkable leader” and a “larger-than-life leader who served his people for almost half a century.” With good reason, Trudeau was widely ridiculed. #TrudeauEulogies began to trend instantly on Twitter and Facebook, with mocking tweets such as, “Mr. Stalin’s greatest achievement was his eradication of obesity in the Ukraine through innovative agricultural reforms.”
The reaction from Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the U.K.’s Labour Party, was similar. “For all his flaws,” Corbyn said, Castro would be remembered as an “internationalist and a champion of social justice.”
Obviously, Trudeau and Corbyn are ignorant of the Castro government’s long record of human-rights abuses, including but not limited to summary executions of thousands of political opponents, massive purges and show-trials for dissidents, “re-education camps” for gays and lesbians, threats of nuclear obliteration against the U.S., censorship and the forced exile of nearly 20 percent of the Cuban population. Either they are not well-versed in Castro’s history, or they choose to look past those “flaws” in the name of ideals that Corbyn and Trudeau champion — namely anti-imperialism and social welfare programs.
To be fair, it is worth noting that Cuba under Castro boasted some of the best literacy rates and health care indicators in Latin America (although this was also true pre-revolution, according to The Washington Post editorial board) and that he liberated Cuba from the brutal American-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. But we must ask ourselves: at what cost?
Did Mahatma Gandhi not liberate India from British domination without executing a single political opponent? Did France not achieve arguably the best health care system in the world without opening a single “re-education camp” for homosexuals?
Trudeau and Corbyn are what Castro’s hero himself, Vladimir Lenin, would have labeled “useful idiots” — propagandists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of. It should be a cause for alarm when powerful leaders of liberal parties around the world mourn the death of such a vile dictator, and it reveals a certain willful ignorance of many liberals for the sake of so-called progressive ideas that dictators such as Castro represent.
But we must not fall into the myth of Castro — the cigar-smoking, olive-green-cap-wearing revolutionary who liberated Cuba from American exploitation, only to replace it with an ultra-repressive Orwellian state. Instead, we must call a spade a spade and recognize Castro for whom he truly was: a tyrant.
Julian Fleischman is a UF political science and telecommunication senior. His column appears on Fridays.
