Good Column by Cohen

[luckydevil]

Hollywood's Darling, Liberals' Blind Spot

By Richard Cohen

Tuesday, April 8, 2003; Page A33

If the valiant Michael Kelly had not been killed in Iraq, he surely would have returned to whacking liberals and liberalism in his newspaper column. I would have read these columns -- it was hard not to read Kelly -- with some irritation but often with chagrin as well. When he said -- and I paraphrase him here -- that at the heart of American liberalism was a deep and inexplicable hole, I knew he was often right. Had he lived, he might have turned his attention to Cuba.

Just recently the government of Fidel Castro arrested about 80 dissidents and almost instantly brought them to trial -- if it can be called that. Foreign journalists and diplomats were excluded from the proceedings, in which 12 of the accused face life sentences. All of them are undoubtedly guilty of seeking greater freedom and on occasion meeting with visiting human rights activists. In Cuba, those are crimes.

Castro is probably relying on the fact that the United States is occupied elsewhere, and as usual, he needs scapegoats to blame for the dismal state of the Cuban economy. But he can rely also on the unswerving naivete and obtuseness of the American left, which consistently has managed to overlook what a goon he is. Instead, it concentrates on his willingness to meet with American intellectuals and chatter long into the night. He is, apparently, good company.

But he is also a tyrant. In its report on Cuba, Human Rights Watch came right to the point: "Over the last 40 years, Cuba has developed a highly effective machinery of repression." What that means is almost no civil liberties and a penal system as medieval and barbaric as any in the world. That system was accurately portrayed in the 2001 movie "Before Night Falls," which was based on the memoir of the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas. He had served time in Castro's jails for being a homosexual. Before killing himself, Arenas left a note: "There is only one person I hold responsible: Fidel Castro."

About the time that movie was released, I talked with someone who had just visited Castro as part of a Hollywood contingent. I had to listen once again to how erudite the Cuban dictator is and how, of course, he has established a first-class health system. No doubt Castro has read his Gabriel Garcia Marquez and no doubt he cares about medical treatment. But he also runs a regime a shade worse than China's, according to Freedom House.

If my Hollywood friend was some sort of aberration, I would not have given him a second thought. But he is fairly typical of many American liberals. They seem to think that any regime targeted by the United States is, ipso facto, an innocent victim. Some of that sentiment once attached to the Soviet Union -- remember how the Cold War was the fault of an insensitive America? -- and more recently to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. From some of what was said from the left, you would think that the current war is really about oil or imperialism or revenge -- and not for a moment about the sort of regime Hussein runs.

It's not that the left has no capacity for outrage. It's just that it's so inconsistent. It can vehemently protest the mistreatment of America's poor or its minorities and yet overlook the mistreatment of Iraqis or, as is now happening, Cubans. Conservatives, too, can be just as inconsistent, but they are not my crowd nor my concern at the moment.

So I would like to hear some moral outrage about Castro. I would like to see the vilification of Cuban Americans cease. They have as much right to lobby the government as do, say, Jewish Americans on behalf of Israel or Greek Americans on behalf of Greece. I'd like to see anyone interrupt one of Fidel's marathon soliloquies to ask about human rights violations.

Fidel Castro is a thug and a fool. Those are constants, unaffected by an inconsistent U.S. embargo -- why Cuba and not China? -- or by the fact that some of his American opponents are political troglodytes. To someone in a Cuban jail, it hardly matters that Castro reads books or that he gushes revolutionary rhetoric -- goop about "the people." The people are impoverished and oppressed.

In homage to Kelly, I'd have to say that we did not often agree. But when we did -- when I would grudgingly nod my head -- was when he roundhoused the left for something like its soft spot for certain tyrants. He was on to something -- and it is something that liberals will have to deal with, or else be dealt out of the game entirely.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[fansince62]

Richard Cohen is an *ss. No more needs to be said.

[JackC]

fansince62,

This guy takes a man's death to write that article? You couldn't have said any better.

[luckydevil]

Still thought it was a good column