Justice Postponed, Too Long, Is Justice Denied

Reflections on the anniversary of the death of Fidel Castro.

Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016.

He ruled the tiny island of Cuba with an iron fist for half a century, then retired in favor of his brother, Raul, known as the enforcer, when health problems finally weakened him.

There are many ways for a head of state to die.  He may die of natural causes while in office or after retirement, like most American presidents.  He may be assassinated unjustly, like Louis XVI and Czar Nicholas II.  He may be overthrown, and tried and executed for his crimes, like Saddam Hussein and Tojo Hideki.  He may be trapped and defeated, and driven to suicide, like Adolf Hitler, or die in a prison cell, like Pol Pot.

For fifty years, the world watched Fidel Castro, expecting his eventual overthrow and subsequent trial, expecting his condemnation and capital punishment by a just world, but it was never to be.  When Fidel Castro died at 90, he was claimed by natural causes.

Justice Postponed, too often, is indeed Justice Denied.

A Lifetime of Evil

The MainStream Media will provide a “balanced” account of his ninety years.  Their obituaries will tell of his youth in Jesuit school, his brief imprisonment by Batista, his subsequent release and revolutionary activism.   The press will tell us that he overthrew dictatorship for democracy, and only entered the Soviet sphere of influence when spurned by the United States.

The press will tell us of his first and second marriages, his children, and how he groomed his brother to succeed him. They may even seek to humanize him by mentioning the parade of (communist) American celebrities who have flocked to Cuba in recent years to pay him homage.

The MainStream Media, however, while admitting to the extremism that cannot be denied entirely, will still not tell the whole truth.  They will not share the details of how Castro’s Catholic teachers won his release from prison, and he showed his gratitude by nationalizing the churches and schools, and then having hundreds of priests and nuns executed in his revolution.  The press will likely fail to report how the Castros’ very first rebel band, The Movement, was proudly Marxist from its very inception;  this would show their storyline for the lie that it is.

The MainStream Press will not share how the Castro brothers – and their monstrous ally Che Guevera, carried on a reign of terror throughout their endless revolution, nationalizing businesses, stealing land, enforcing Marxist theft on the entire country.  The press will not report on Castro’s secret police, a Stalinist organization with the full power to spy, to arrest, to torture, imprison and kill.  They won’t talk about the bloodthirsty executions, personally carried out by Che and the brothers, by the dozens, sometimes even by the hundreds; they won’t talk of the mass graves and the generation of fatherless children the Castros left in their wake.

Watch as the press reports that Castro brothers started out as just “proud independents” who refused to live as vassals of the United States; the press won’t admit that Castro’s Cuba was not just “in the Soviet orbit,” it was Russia’s primary vassal, its distributor of Marxist-Leninist revolution throughout the Cold War.

Not content to destroy the lives of eleven million impoverished and miserable Cubans, Fidel Castro devoted his life to being the Typhoid Mary of Marxism:

He sent his military advisors abroad, ordering these communist insurgents to foment revolution around the world – Cuban killers bearing Russian weaponry.  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, Fidel Castro was as responsible for mass death and destruction as a mafia boss who writes out murder contracts.  The difference is, when a mob boss issues a hit, it’s for one or two victims; when Fidel sent his rebels to Vietnam, Angola, Venezuela, Ghana, Algeria, Yemen…  and so many more… the deaths that resulted were in the thousands, even tens of thousands, over the years.

Even when so many other failed communist governments gave up the ghost, in the great collapse of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s, Fidel Castro never let up.  His government was just as Stalinist the day he died as it was the day he took over.

A Legacy of Pain

We in the United States have no frame of reference with which to compare.  For most American presidents, at least until the current one, it can fairly be said that some aspects of their terms left the country better off, even if the president himself couldn’t claim full credit for it.  Our nation has benefited from limited government, the rule of law, great natural resources, entrepreneurship and technological advancement for over two centuries.

Cuba has been denied such tools, and has therefore been denied the benefit of their application. Castro’s government was absolute, with political prisoners filling their jails until freed by natural death or execution.  Instead of the rule of law, so vaunted across western civilization, it has been the rule of man; in Cuba, you cross the Castros at your peril.  The natural resources of a tropical island with fertile soil are wasted by an economy that forbids entrepreneurship as “a bourgeois endeavor” and keeps the economy so flat that it can’t even enjoy the benefits of the computer age.

Imagine – instead of Castro’s mandatory Marxism – what might have been possible with sixty years of free enterprise.  Cuba has the best beaches, the best soil, the best potential of any Caribbean island.  Without the Castros, the people would range from middle class to wealth.  There is no reason – other than the brake of hardcore Marxism – why Cuba’s beaches don’t rival the French and Italian Riviera in development, opportunity and prosperity.  The eleven million Cubans who the Castros have allowed to live just suffer, condemned to live in Marxist poverty, instead of enjoying the prosperity that sixty years of capitalism would have nourished.

And imagine, too, the millions in all those other countries that Castro meddled with over the years.  How many children never knew their parents, because of Cuban military advisors fomenting revolution, organizing terror, and sometimes winning civil wars to install communist rule.  How many wives lost their husbands or fathers; how many husbands and fathers lost their wives and daughters, to these killers from Havana?  How many millions starved because their governments had to spend precious resources fighting off communists, instead of nourishing their economies and ensuring a market with affordable food?

The legacy of Fidel Castro is a legacy of pain and suffering, not only in Cuba but across the globe.

The Iron Curtain, Drawn Back

In the early 1990s, Soviet communism came to an end, and freedom spread across the Warsaw Pact.  Mikhail Gorbachev and Erich Honecker were deposed; Nicolae Ceausescu was arrested and executed. General Jaruzelski of Poland was replaced by Tadeusz Mazowiecki of Solidarity.

But nothing changed in Cuba.  The flow of funds from Russia dried up, but Havana’s policies of Marxist economics, dictatorial rule, enforced poverty and authoritarian terror, never let up.

The world watched, and waited, as the 90s gave way to the 2000s, as the 2000s gave way to the 2010s.  Fidel Castro got sick and resigned, but only ceded power to his brother, which is like one pack of hyenas tiring from an attack, only to be replaced by another pack of hyenas.  As the old song goes, “Second verse, same as the first.”

Still, there is quiet rejoicing in Cuba today, and around the globe as well, because – even if the constabulary is watching, so there can be no fireworks, no happy toasts – we know that, deep within the hearts of the people, there is joy at the knowledge that this particular demon’s heart beats no more.

It will forever be the shame of humanity that this tyrant lived so long in freedom, while he oppressed everyone else in his domain.  It is our shame that we never stopped him, never arrested him for his crimes, never freed his people from the grip of his hyena’s claws… but then, it is the shame of his fellow Cubans that they didn’t rise up and do it themselves.

Still, while justice may have been denied in this life, we can take comfort in the knowledge that justice in the next is not dependent on the foreign policy of earthly governments or the courage of an oppressed citizenry.

Even now, Fidel Castro is already learning that there are places so hot that a Cuban summer is like a refrigerator by comparison, and he’ll be enduring that new environment for as many millennia as it takes, to begin to make up for his long tyranny’s endless string of innocent victims.

Copyright 2016 John F. Di Leo

Originally published in the Chicago Daily Observer, 11-25-2016

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant.  A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009.  His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available only on Amazon

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