April 7, 2008

 

 

 

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8

Just another dictator

Apparently committing indiscriminate
killings in order to prop up your own
grotesque Orwellian personality cult
is a-okay just as long as you are doing
it in the name of universal healthcare
and Noam Chomsky, as opposed to
income tax cuts and Milton Friedman.
You’ll never see Castro profiled in any
magazine as a living embodiment of
evil, nor see any college kids march to
the art gallery to denounce his regime
ten years after he leaves office.

Dictatorships can be complicated
things, and it’s not hard to argue that
some dictators have been necessary,
or even good for their countries when
viewed ina long-term historical context.
Good dictators, however, are usually
transformative, transitory figures.
They come in, make changes, then
hand over power to someone better.
Such was the case of Pinochet, who
ruled for 16 highly reformative years
before stepping aside and reinstituting
democracy.

Castro could have been a man like
this, but he was ultimately too vain and
sadistic. He instead ruled Cuba as his
private theme park for a ridiculously
long 50-year term before handing the
reins of power to his younger brother, as
if the island was his family’s hereditary
fiefdom. The country remains as poor
and backwards as it was when Castro
first took over, a perverted time capsule
of bad ideas from the 1950s.

Whatever minor successes Castro
achieved during his time in office are
dull diamonds in a sprawling sea of
dirt. Years from now, historians will
doubtlessly look back in astonishment
at the fawning treatment of this strange,
gruesome man who did so little for his
nation, yet took so very much.

 

 

 

 

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