Obama’s ideas, campaign slogans, posters and oratory are like candy-candy coated socialism-to lesftists and they eat it up.
Henry Gomez, in his series, “Your my.barackobama.com quote of the day” has showcased just how enthusiastically the left has embraced Obamania on this very blog.
Other reminders of the The Obama – (c)astro connection are the che flag in one of Obama’s campaign offices in Houston and “el compañero (f)idel’s” tacit endorsement of Obama as the “most progressive” candidate.
But it’s not just us intransigent Cuban exiles that see the similarities between Obama and (c)astro. Alice Walker, the American author of “the Color Purple” and ardent Fidel admirer, is jealous of the Cuban people because, she says, they have a leader who loves them and that is what she wants for America in the person of Obama. God help us.
In a September 20th op ed. Published in The Gaurdian, Ms. Walker laments of the burden of living in America without a (f)idel – like leader:
However poor the Cubans might be, I realised, they cared about each other and they had a leader who loved them. A leader who loved them. Imagine. A leader not afraid to be out in the streets with them, a leader not ashamed to show himself as troubled and humbled as they were. A leader who
would not leave them to wonder and worry alone, but would stand with them, walk with them, celebrate with them - whatever the parade might be.
She then professes her belief that Senator Obama with his campaign promise of collective change, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” is the one to fill that void for the long suffering American people, as undeserving as we may be:
Perhaps with the certainty that though we are as we are and sorely imperfect, we still deserve someone in leadership who "gets" us, and that this self-defeating habit of accepting our leaders' contempt need not continue. Maybe with the realisation that we, the people, are truly the leaders, and that we are the ones we have been waiting for.
Dr Mario Beira, author of the first psychoanalytic study of Fidel Castro and a friend of the blog, did not find Alice Walkers’ delusions as funny as I did and sent The Guardian a response to try to set the record straight. It’s doubtful that the leftist british paper will publish his scholarly rebuke so I asked for his permission to let me post it here. His analysis is called “The Psychology of the Radical Left. A Response to Alice Walker’s Support Of Fidel Castro and Her Endorsement of Barak Obama.” Here’s a little taste:
Is Ms. Walker referring to the same Fidel Castro who threw priests, Jehovah Witnesses, hippies and gays living in the island during the decade of the 60’s into concentration camps simply because of their sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs? Is this the same Castro, we wonder, who banned celebration of Christmas in Cuba in 1969 and who went on to declare the country an atheist state while actively persecuting those who dared to disobey his laws and decrees? Is Ms. Walker referring to the same Castro who, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962, rushed a letter to Chairman Khrushchev in Moscow encouraging him to launch a nuclear strike against the United States knowing full well that such an act would lead the American government to retaliate and to wipe the Cuban island and its inhabitants from the face of the earth?
The whole exellent response is below the fold….
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE RADICAL LEFT.
A RESPONSE TO ALICE WALKER’S SUPPORT OF FIDEL CASTRO
AND HER ENDORSEMENT OF BARAK OBAMA.
BY: MARIO L. BEIRA
. . . the aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master. That is what experience has proved. What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have one.
Jacques Lacan
December 3, 1969
The article recently published in The Guardian by poet Alice Walker in support of Barak Obama is couched within a uniquely twisted logic. (See Alice Walker: The US needs a leader who can love the American people, The Guardian, Saturday September 20, 2008, pg 36, Commentary and Debate section). Cubans living in Cuba under Castro, she argues, might be poor and suffering, but they at least, unlike Americans, have had the good fortune and privilege of enjoying a leader who has showered them with love, care and concern for nearly half a century.
Is Ms. Walker referring to the same Fidel Castro who threw priests, Jehovah Witnesses, hippies and gays living in the island during the decade of the 60’s into concentration camps simply because of their sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs? Is this the same Castro, we wonder, who banned celebration of Christmas in Cuba in 1969 and who went on to declare the country an atheist state while actively persecuting those who dared to disobey his laws and decrees? Is Ms. Walker referring to the same Castro who, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962, rushed a letter to Chairman Khrushchev in Moscow encouraging him to launch a nuclear strike against the United States knowing full well that such an act would lead the American government to retaliate and to wipe the Cuban island and its inhabitants from the face of the earth?
Ms. Walker certainly maintains a strange idea of what love entails. Her claim that Castro loves and cares for the Cuban people not only ignores the historical record, but sadly dishonors the many individuals who’ve experienced torture and maltreatment at his hands. The list of Castro’s victims is unfortunately too long to provide here. It includes not only American soldiers captured by the communist enemy during the Vietnam War, but many poets, writers and journalist locked up in Cuban jails today. Ms. Walker might want to refresh her memory on the question of Castro’s love for the Cuban people by reading Before Night Falls, penned by the late gay Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. The novel recounts the degradation and abuse Mr. Arenas was made to suffer after he was imprisoned by the Cuban leader in 1973. Accused of “ideological deviation” for being openly gay, the Cuban government proceeded to systematically strip Mr. Arenas of his very dignity and humanity.
Given her concern for human rights and for the suffering of people of color, she might then wish to travel to Castro’s Caribbean island to speak to a multitude of Afro-Cuban political activists who’ve endured degradation, jailing and torture, their only crime being their opposition to the Cuban leader’s dictatorship and a desire to see the Cuban nation grow more open, democratic and free. I am thinking, in particular, of Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez and of Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, practicing Christians who are also admirers of the late Martin Luther King Jr. Both men have experienced years of maltreatment, physical and psychological torture in Castro’s gulags.
Dr. Biscet, a medical doctor, was sentenced in 2003 to a 25 year jail sentence for advocating on behalf of human rights in the island. He languishes in one of Castro’s jails today and is seldom allowed outside visitors. Mr. Antunez, the other well known Afro-Cuban dissident, was arrested and imprisoned by Castro at age 25. He served more than 17 years in prison, experiencing torture and abuse in the process. He has been re-arrested on several occasions following his release as he has continued to speak up against the Castro regime and its systematic violation of human rights in the island.
Castro’s government has in fact been disproportionately cruel against Cuban blacks who’ve dared to speak up against his government. Indeed, Ms. Walker might be surprised to learn that the Castro’s government has banned the biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in Cuba, afraid that Afro-Cubans might become familiar with the American Civil rights leader’s tactics of civil disobedience and will start implementing these to help force democratic changes in the island.
The American poet might likewise profit from knowing that the longest serving black political prisoner of the 20th century was an Afro-Cuban named Eusebio Peñalver. After initially supporting and fighting on behalf of Fidel and the Revolution, Mr. Peñalver became disillusioned and critical of the lack of fundamental freedom in Cuba. He began voicing support for democratic changes and was promptly arrested. He served nearly 30 years in prison, enduring regular beatings, psychological harassment and torture in the process. Mr. Peñalver passed away in Miami in May of 2005 where he continued to denounce Castro and his egomaniacal dictatorial style until the end.
Afro-Cubans are not only disenfranchised, but are in fact more likely than whites to be discriminated and to live in substandard housing in Castro’s Cuba. Cuban blacks in fact hold very few positions of power in the island. A 2005 University of Miami report alerts that while Afro-Cubans make up more than 60% of Cuba’s population, they only hold 5% of jobs in the tourist industry, the positions most desired by Cubans residing in the island. Afro-Cubans have little political power under Castro as well. Only 5 % of the membership of the Council of Ministers, and 7 % of the Presidents of Provincial Assemblies, are black. Afro-Cubans also hold little to no power within the Cuban military apparatus; not one of the top 10 individuals in senior military leadership positions, the University report notes, is black. The only place where Afro-Cubans are overly represented in Cuba is in the island’s prison population which is 85 % black.
While in Cuba, Ms Walker might also wish to consult with family members of Jorge Luis Martinez Isaac, Lorenzo Enriquez Copella Castillo and Barbaro Leodan Sevilla Garcia, 3 Afro-Cuban men who, rather than sit atop an inflated flimsy tire inner tube with the hope of safely drifting across the shark filled waters of the Florida Straits, instead decided to commandeer a ferry to escape the island and reach the USA. The ferry eventually ran out of gas and the 3 men were soon arrested by Cuban authorities. Despite the fact that no one was injured during the hijacking attempt, Castro promptly executed the three men on April of 2003. The Cuban government’s treatment of black’s who live in the island has gotten so out of hand that even the Reverend Al Sharpton has begun asking the Cuban government for an explanation of its behavior and practices.
Castro’s total lack of care and concern for the Cuban people speaks loudly through the “social” or “public dangerousness” law that his government began implementing just a few years ago. The legislation allows Cuban authorities to detain and jail individuals whom they believe are likely to commit a crime against the Castro government in the future. A number of Cubans are actually serving jail time today under this bizarre piece of legislation, convicted only of a “proclivity to commit a crime”. The law, needless to say, has been widely criticized and condemned by human rights groups throughout the world.
Castro’s disdain for Cubans who disagree with his policies is most powerfully confirmed by an incident that has sadly received little to no coverage by the US media. I am referring to the “13 de Marzo” tugboat incident. The vessel in question was stolen on the early morning of July 13 1994 by 78 Cubans who attempted to use the watercraft to flee the island. Castro’s forces responded by surrounding the tugboat as it was heading out to sea, opening up their powerful water cannons against the vessel and the 78 passengers on board. Their barbaric response led to the death of 41 people, including 10 children who were on board. The incident was widely condemned as a crime. Castro, however, not only refused to order an investigation, but quickly pronounced those responsible for the massacre heroes of the revolution.
Unbiased scholars who are familiar with Fidel Castro’s history know full well that the Cuban leader has never been motivated by “love”, but by hate and revenge against the American nation. The nature of Castro unrelenting hate for the US flows directly from his unresolved and unsymbolized trauma with his father, from the fact that Fidel was not only born a bastard - a result of Angel Castro having slept with one of his cooks, a woman thirty years his junior - but was rejected, separated and cast-off from his mother and home on the direct orders of his father as a child. Castro was not only discarded and sent away by Angel Castro, but completely rejected by his godfather, the man after whom he had been named, during his childhood as well. Both men had grown rich and powerful in Cuba as a result of their business dealings with the US owned United Fruit Company; both rejected and failed to bless the future Cuban rebel with their names during his early formative years.
Castro, who was unable to legally claim his father’s surname until he was a teenager, expressed his intentions and feelings for the United States in a letter he penned to his female assistant and lover on June 5 of 1958. “When this war is over”, declared Castro even while still in the mountains trying to overthrow Batista, “a new war, longer and much larger, will begin for me: the war that I will wage against them [the Americans]. I realize that this will be my true destiny”. Fidel Castro has certainly managed to live up to his word!
Castro’s long history of disdain for Cubans who disagree with his policies is not only confirmed by the fact that he typically refers to them as “gusanos” (worms), but by the fact that his government has for decades organized “rapid action brigades” and encouraged its members to visit the home of citizens who either wish to leave the island, or who disagree with his form of government, in order to insult, beat up, humiliate and spit upon them. Castro’s police typically materialize only after these “acts of repudiation” have transpired, usually to either arrest or transfer the victims to the hospital while accusing them of having provoked the violence they’ve endured.
Castro’s immoral behavior against the Cuban citizenry has been denounced by nearly every independent human rights organization in the free world. The extra-judicial executions and violation of basic human rights in Cuba since he took over in 1959 are too many, the number of prisoners of conscience too high for Ms Walker to claim that Fidel Castro loves and cares for the Cuban people. Indeed even when Cubans face unprecedented suffering, as they do today following two powerful hurricanes that recently hit the island, the Castro led government refuses to accept millions of dollars in aid from the USA that would help to alleviate and lessen the suffering of the populace. Castro not only puts politics before people, but has managed to turn a nation that stood near the top of every economic and health indicator in our hemisphere into the economic basket case of the new world. Millions of Cubans live today in the island without adequate housing, only the stars and a super dark sky to look up to at night as they face and ponder a bleak tomorrow.
Ms Walker, however, is proposing something more disturbing and sinister through her article than the idea of our viewing Fidel Castro as a loving and caring hero. She is endorsing Barak Obama, she claims, precisely because of her conviction that the Junior Senator from Illinois, were he to become our President, would treat our citizens as Fidel Castro has treated the Cuban people. God help us! I for one wonder how Mr. Obama will respond to her political endorsement as well as her decision to link him with Castro’s policies and “love” for the Cuban people.
Ms. Walker’s backing of Obama and praising of Fidel Castro is revealing for a number of other reasons as well. She claims, for example, that she is endorsing Obama not only because he loves us like Castro loves his people but also because John McCain is “too old for the job”. Beyond her insulting and discriminatory words against the Republican candidate, Ms. Walker also proceeds to belittle and degrade the American people as a whole as well.
Indeed, one would think that Ms. Walker would just this once be motivated to celebrate and applaud our nation and citizenry for the immense progress it has made on issues related to race discrimination. Just 43 years after the Voting Rights Act was approved in 1965, and a mere 45 years since Dr. King delivered his moving and inspiring I Have a Dream speech in the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, an African-American man has not only been selected by one of our two major political parties as its candidate for the US presidency but is leading in all national poles, the one person most likely to be elected as our next leader. Ms Walker, however, disregards the progress our nation has made on race issues in her endorsement to instead describe Americans as “imperfect to the max, racist and sexist and greedy above all”.
For the record, Americans are just the opposite of greedy. They are in fact the most charitable and generous people in the world, leading the globe, year after year, in voluntary giving and in volunteerism itself. The two wealthiest individuals in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, for example, behave quite different than the ultra rich from other countries. Mr. Gates, founder of Microsoft, has personally given away billions of dollars of his fortune to charity, his largest single donation, 1 billion dollars, was awarded to the United Negro College Fund to help educate African-American men and women. The other self-made American multibillionaire, Warren Buffet, announced in June of 2006 his decision to give away more than half of his vast fortune, donating a staggering $30.7 billion to charity to help improve and lessen the suffering of the global community.
The American nation Ms. Walker so unthinkingly condemns has been the leading financial contributor to the World Food Program for years as well. A third of the 1.1 Billion dollars that the UN organization had collected as of May of 2008 came from a single source, the American Government. Tellingly, and despite the fact that their profits have reached record highs during the past year as oil prices have risen to unprecedented new levels, most oil rich countries and members of OPEC fail to even appear on the list of top donors to the organization.
Ms. Walker’s charges against Americans and the US government, as well as her praise of Fidel Castro and his political ideology, is indefensible. Communism, which she apparently supports, has only produced oppression, poverty and unspeakable barbarism during the past 90 years.
The radical left, however, has sadly defended every communist dictator who has appeared on the scene since the triumph of Bolshevism and Lenin’s founding of the Soviet Republic in 1917. The beneficiaries have included the ruthless and brutal Joseph Stalin, praised by many members of the left during in the 30’s, as well as Chairman Mao, who’s demented Cultural Revolution was applauded by these same leftists during the 60’s. The current intellectual leader of this odd political club, Noam Chomsky, not only joins Ms Walker in admiring and advocating on behalf of Fidel Castro, but once attempted to minimize Pol Pot’s murderous genocidal rampage, pointing the finger at the USA as at bottom responsible for the sick doings of “brother number one” during his effort to establish an agrarian Communist utopia in Cambodia in the 70’s.
The deciding and key word here is “utopia”, notion deeply appealing to the members of the radical left. Marxism itself appears to have been founded upon a messianic and utopian ideology. Never mind the killing fields, the concentration camps, the persecution and acts of cruelty and murder against the populace, as long as the leader is laboring to build a classless utopian society we will defend it, all will be forgiven, or explained away, or simply forgotten, reasons the radical leftists. The messianic Communist leaders they applaud are typically viewed by them as being endowed with “political potential”, to translate the French phrase that gave rise to Pol Pot’s own name, something that then leads them to disregard or excuse their behaviors. In the case of the late Cambodian communist leader, more than a quarter of his country’s population was murdered, starved or simply worked to death in his sick effort to count down to year zero.
Pol Pot’s killing fields are mere child’s play, however, when compared to the doings of Mao Tse-Tung, the 20th century’s biggest communist monster. Even Adolph Hitler’s unspeakable malevolence and cruelty falls short of the evil perpetrated by Mr. Mao in China. Despite the fact that conservative estimate put the number of those who died at the hand’s of Mao and his cohorts at 70 million, the Great Helmsman was not only praised by the radical left during his time in power, but continues to be viewed by many of these same leftist today, particularly in France and Europe, as a man whose ideology is inspiring, to be emulated and honored.
The land of the radical left truly knows no logic. Their unapologetic hatred of the US and the American people is in fact so deep that it brings many of its members to blindly support totalitarian regimes throughout the world, if only the regime in question is an enemy of the United States and “imperialism”. It is one thing to see Hugo Chavez embracing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran, quite another to hear members of the left applauding their union and working alliance. Have these utopian inspired leftist forgotten the fact that Iran’s government regularly tortures and murders dissidents, actively discriminates against women (the value of a women’s life in Iran is legally “half that of a man”) and persecutes homosexuals, non-Muslims and Jews?
The fact that Iran views the United States as its enemy and, moreover, that the Iranian leadership has called for the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state of Israel, the only functioning democracy in the entire Middle East, not only leads these leftist to turn a blind eye to the Ayatollahs disturbing human rights record but to keep silent on Ahmadinejad threatening pronouncements.
The same warped and twisted logic that rules the mind of radical leftist explains just why Ms. Walker, rather than celebrate and interpret the fact that Obama is receiving wide support from American whites as sign of decreased racism and as evidence of positive change in our land is instead led to describe our nation and the American people as “imperfect to the max, racist and sexist and greedy above all”.
Radical leftists, if truth be told, have seldom if ever been interested in defending democracy, liberal or otherwise, or in applauding changes brought about by peaceful democratic means. What radical leftists typically mean by “change” is violent radical change, preferably to be realized by revolution and upheaval and under the direction of a single leader or Master. It matters little whether the revolutionary Event unfolds in Havana or Tehran, or whether the leader then proceeds to establish a totalitarian regime that systematically violates the rights of its citizenry, as long as it’s anti-American, reasons the radical leftist: “sign me up!”
I offer these passing remarks as someone who identifies neither with the Left nor Right wing of the political spectrum and as an independent thinker who situates himself in the political middle, somewhere between the foolishness of Alice Walker and the knavery of a Rush Limbaugh. While there’s certainly plenty of stupidity and much to criticize about many of the ideas and arguments proposed by right wingers, the opinions being advanced today by members of the radical left serve to contravene the principles of the Enlightenment, indeed the very values that are central to our spiritual and religious traditions and that have served to shape our ideas of justice, fairness and goodness.
It is promising to see, however, that a number of intellectuals who have traditionally identified with the political left have begun to actively question the logic of some of their more radical comrades. The world’s most famous Continental philosopher writing today, the Marxist Slavoj Zizek, for example, has in the last few years taken active steps to expose and criticize what he pinpoints in his work as the troubling moral relativism of the left. My purpose here has been to offer a few analytic observations on this troubling trend and to respond to Alice Walker’s decision to link Barak Obama with Fidel Castro in the process. The logic of her argument not only defies common sense - for our sake let us all hope that it does - but presents us with clear and convincing evidence of why the left, to play on the title of Bernard-Henri Levy’s latest book, is today facing such dark times.
Mario L. Beira holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and is a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He has lectured nationally and internationally on psychoanalysis and is the author of the first comprehensive psychological study of Fidel Castro, scheduled to be published by Rodopi (Amsterdam) under the title Fidel Castro Ruz. A Psycho-Analytic Study. A Spanish language abridged version of his study was recently published by Verbum, an editorial house based in Madrid, Spain.
Is Ms. Walker referring to the same Fidel Castro who threw priests, Jehovah Witnesses, hippies and gays living in the island during the decade of the 60’s into concentration camps simply because of their sexual orientation, religious or political beliefs? Is this the same Castro, we wonder, who banned celebration of Christmas in Cuba in 1969 and who went on to declare the country an atheist state while actively persecuting those who dared to disobey his laws and decrees? Is Ms. Walker referring to the same Castro who, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962, rushed a letter to Chairman Khrushchev in Moscow encouraging him to launch a nuclear strike against the United States knowing full well that such an act would lead the American government to retaliate and to wipe the Cuban island and its inhabitants from the face of the earth?
Ms. Walker certainly maintains a strange idea of what love entails. Her claim that Castro loves and cares for the Cuban people not only ignores the historical record, but sadly dishonors the many individuals who’ve experienced torture and maltreatment at his hands. The list of Castro’s victims is unfortunately too long to provide here. It includes not only American soldiers captured by the communist enemy during the Vietnam War, but many poets, writers and journalist locked up in Cuban jails today. Ms. Walker might want to refresh her memory on the question of Castro’s love for the Cuban people by reading Before Night Falls, penned by the late gay Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. The novel recounts the degradation and abuse Mr. Arenas was made to suffer after he was imprisoned by the Cuban leader in 1973. Accused of “ideological deviation” for being openly gay, the Cuban government proceeded to systematically strip Mr. Arenas of his very dignity and humanity.
Given her concern for human rights and for the suffering of people of color, she might then wish to travel to Castro’s Caribbean island to speak to a multitude of Afro-Cuban political activists who’ve endured degradation, jailing and torture, their only crime being their opposition to the Cuban leader’s dictatorship and a desire to see the Cuban nation grow more open, democratic and free. I am thinking, in particular, of Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez and of Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, practicing Christians who are also admirers of the late Martin Luther King Jr. Both men have experienced years of maltreatment, physical and psychological torture in Castro’s gulags.
Dr. Biscet, a medical doctor, was sentenced in 2003 to a 25 year jail sentence for advocating on behalf of human rights in the island. He languishes in one of Castro’s jails today and is seldom allowed outside visitors. Mr. Antunez, the other well known Afro-Cuban dissident, was arrested and imprisoned by Castro at age 25. He served more than 17 years in prison, experiencing torture and abuse in the process. He has been re-arrested on several occasions following his release as he has continued to speak up against the Castro regime and its systematic violation of human rights in the island.
Castro’s government has in fact been disproportionately cruel against Cuban blacks who’ve dared to speak up against his government. Indeed, Ms. Walker might be surprised to learn that the Castro’s government has banned the biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in Cuba, afraid that Afro-Cubans might become familiar with the American Civil rights leader’s tactics of civil disobedience and will start implementing these to help force democratic changes in the island.
The American poet might likewise profit from knowing that the longest serving black political prisoner of the 20th century was an Afro-Cuban named Eusebio Peñalver. After initially supporting and fighting on behalf of Fidel and the Revolution, Mr. Peñalver became disillusioned and critical of the lack of fundamental freedom in Cuba. He began voicing support for democratic changes and was promptly arrested. He served nearly 30 years in prison, enduring regular beatings, psychological harassment and torture in the process. Mr. Peñalver passed away in Miami in May of 2005 where he continued to denounce Castro and his egomaniacal dictatorial style until the end.
Afro-Cubans are not only disenfranchised, but are in fact more likely than whites to be discriminated and to live in substandard housing in Castro’s Cuba. Cuban blacks in fact hold very few positions of power in the island. A 2005 University of Miami report alerts that while Afro-Cubans make up more than 60% of Cuba’s population, they only hold 5% of jobs in the tourist industry, the positions most desired by Cubans residing in the island. Afro-Cubans have little political power under Castro as well. Only 5 % of the membership of the Council of Ministers, and 7 % of the Presidents of Provincial Assemblies, are black. Afro-Cubans also hold little to no power within the Cuban military apparatus; not one of the top 10 individuals in senior military leadership positions, the University report notes, is black. The only place where Afro-Cubans are overly represented in Cuba is in the island’s prison population which is 85 % black.
While in Cuba, Ms Walker might also wish to consult with family members of Jorge Luis Martinez Isaac, Lorenzo Enriquez Copella Castillo and Barbaro Leodan Sevilla Garcia, 3 Afro-Cuban men who, rather than sit atop an inflated flimsy tire inner tube with the hope of safely drifting across the shark filled waters of the Florida Straits, instead decided to commandeer a ferry to escape the island and reach the USA. The ferry eventually ran out of gas and the 3 men were soon arrested by Cuban authorities. Despite the fact that no one was injured during the hijacking attempt, Castro promptly executed the three men on April of 2003. The Cuban government’s treatment of black’s who live in the island has gotten so out of hand that even the Reverend Al Sharpton has begun asking the Cuban government for an explanation of its behavior and practices.
Castro’s total lack of care and concern for the Cuban people speaks loudly through the “social” or “public dangerousness” law that his government began implementing just a few years ago. The legislation allows Cuban authorities to detain and jail individuals whom they believe are likely to commit a crime against the Castro government in the future. A number of Cubans are actually serving jail time today under this bizarre piece of legislation, convicted only of a “proclivity to commit a crime”. The law, needless to say, has been widely criticized and condemned by human rights groups throughout the world.
Castro’s disdain for Cubans who disagree with his policies is most powerfully confirmed by an incident that has sadly received little to no coverage by the US media. I am referring to the “13 de Marzo” tugboat incident. The vessel in question was stolen on the early morning of July 13 1994 by 78 Cubans who attempted to use the watercraft to flee the island. Castro’s forces responded by surrounding the tugboat as it was heading out to sea, opening up their powerful water cannons against the vessel and the 78 passengers on board. Their barbaric response led to the death of 41 people, including 10 children who were on board. The incident was widely condemned as a crime. Castro, however, not only refused to order an investigation, but quickly pronounced those responsible for the massacre heroes of the revolution.
Unbiased scholars who are familiar with Fidel Castro’s history know full well that the Cuban leader has never been motivated by “love”, but by hate and revenge against the American nation. The nature of Castro unrelenting hate for the US flows directly from his unresolved and unsymbolized trauma with his father, from the fact that Fidel was not only born a bastard - a result of Angel Castro having slept with one of his cooks, a woman thirty years his junior - but was rejected, separated and cast-off from his mother and home on the direct orders of his father as a child. Castro was not only discarded and sent away by Angel Castro, but completely rejected by his godfather, the man after whom he had been named, during his childhood as well. Both men had grown rich and powerful in Cuba as a result of their business dealings with the US owned United Fruit Company; both rejected and failed to bless the future Cuban rebel with their names during his early formative years.
Castro, who was unable to legally claim his father’s surname until he was a teenager, expressed his intentions and feelings for the United States in a letter he penned to his female assistant and lover on June 5 of 1958. “When this war is over”, declared Castro even while still in the mountains trying to overthrow Batista, “a new war, longer and much larger, will begin for me: the war that I will wage against them [the Americans]. I realize that this will be my true destiny”. Fidel Castro has certainly managed to live up to his word!
Castro’s long history of disdain for Cubans who disagree with his policies is not only confirmed by the fact that he typically refers to them as “gusanos” (worms), but by the fact that his government has for decades organized “rapid action brigades” and encouraged its members to visit the home of citizens who either wish to leave the island, or who disagree with his form of government, in order to insult, beat up, humiliate and spit upon them. Castro’s police typically materialize only after these “acts of repudiation” have transpired, usually to either arrest or transfer the victims to the hospital while accusing them of having provoked the violence they’ve endured.
Castro’s immoral behavior against the Cuban citizenry has been denounced by nearly every independent human rights organization in the free world. The extra-judicial executions and violation of basic human rights in Cuba since he took over in 1959 are too many, the number of prisoners of conscience too high for Ms Walker to claim that Fidel Castro loves and cares for the Cuban people. Indeed even when Cubans face unprecedented suffering, as they do today following two powerful hurricanes that recently hit the island, the Castro led government refuses to accept millions of dollars in aid from the USA that would help to alleviate and lessen the suffering of the populace. Castro not only puts politics before people, but has managed to turn a nation that stood near the top of every economic and health indicator in our hemisphere into the economic basket case of the new world. Millions of Cubans live today in the island without adequate housing, only the stars and a super dark sky to look up to at night as they face and ponder a bleak tomorrow.
Ms Walker, however, is proposing something more disturbing and sinister through her article than the idea of our viewing Fidel Castro as a loving and caring hero. She is endorsing Barak Obama, she claims, precisely because of her conviction that the Junior Senator from Illinois, were he to become our President, would treat our citizens as Fidel Castro has treated the Cuban people. God help us! I for one wonder how Mr. Obama will respond to her political endorsement as well as her decision to link him with Castro’s policies and “love” for the Cuban people.
Ms. Walker’s backing of Obama and praising of Fidel Castro is revealing for a number of other reasons as well. She claims, for example, that she is endorsing Obama not only because he loves us like Castro loves his people but also because John McCain is “too old for the job”. Beyond her insulting and discriminatory words against the Republican candidate, Ms. Walker also proceeds to belittle and degrade the American people as a whole as well.
Indeed, one would think that Ms. Walker would just this once be motivated to celebrate and applaud our nation and citizenry for the immense progress it has made on issues related to race discrimination. Just 43 years after the Voting Rights Act was approved in 1965, and a mere 45 years since Dr. King delivered his moving and inspiring I Have a Dream speech in the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, an African-American man has not only been selected by one of our two major political parties as its candidate for the US presidency but is leading in all national poles, the one person most likely to be elected as our next leader. Ms Walker, however, disregards the progress our nation has made on race issues in her endorsement to instead describe Americans as “imperfect to the max, racist and sexist and greedy above all”.
For the record, Americans are just the opposite of greedy. They are in fact the most charitable and generous people in the world, leading the globe, year after year, in voluntary giving and in volunteerism itself. The two wealthiest individuals in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, for example, behave quite different than the ultra rich from other countries. Mr. Gates, founder of Microsoft, has personally given away billions of dollars of his fortune to charity, his largest single donation, 1 billion dollars, was awarded to the United Negro College Fund to help educate African-American men and women. The other self-made American multibillionaire, Warren Buffet, announced in June of 2006 his decision to give away more than half of his vast fortune, donating a staggering $30.7 billion to charity to help improve and lessen the suffering of the global community.
The American nation Ms. Walker so unthinkingly condemns has been the leading financial contributor to the World Food Program for years as well. A third of the 1.1 Billion dollars that the UN organization had collected as of May of 2008 came from a single source, the American Government. Tellingly, and despite the fact that their profits have reached record highs during the past year as oil prices have risen to unprecedented new levels, most oil rich countries and members of OPEC fail to even appear on the list of top donors to the organization.
Ms. Walker’s charges against Americans and the US government, as well as her praise of Fidel Castro and his political ideology, is indefensible. Communism, which she apparently supports, has only produced oppression, poverty and unspeakable barbarism during the past 90 years.
The radical left, however, has sadly defended every communist dictator who has appeared on the scene since the triumph of Bolshevism and Lenin’s founding of the Soviet Republic in 1917. The beneficiaries have included the ruthless and brutal Joseph Stalin, praised by many members of the left during in the 30’s, as well as Chairman Mao, who’s demented Cultural Revolution was applauded by these same leftists during the 60’s. The current intellectual leader of this odd political club, Noam Chomsky, not only joins Ms Walker in admiring and advocating on behalf of Fidel Castro, but once attempted to minimize Pol Pot’s murderous genocidal rampage, pointing the finger at the USA as at bottom responsible for the sick doings of “brother number one” during his effort to establish an agrarian Communist utopia in Cambodia in the 70’s.
The deciding and key word here is “utopia”, notion deeply appealing to the members of the radical left. Marxism itself appears to have been founded upon a messianic and utopian ideology. Never mind the killing fields, the concentration camps, the persecution and acts of cruelty and murder against the populace, as long as the leader is laboring to build a classless utopian society we will defend it, all will be forgiven, or explained away, or simply forgotten, reasons the radical leftists. The messianic Communist leaders they applaud are typically viewed by them as being endowed with “political potential”, to translate the French phrase that gave rise to Pol Pot’s own name, something that then leads them to disregard or excuse their behaviors. In the case of the late Cambodian communist leader, more than a quarter of his country’s population was murdered, starved or simply worked to death in his sick effort to count down to year zero.
Pol Pot’s killing fields are mere child’s play, however, when compared to the doings of Mao Tse-Tung, the 20th century’s biggest communist monster. Even Adolph Hitler’s unspeakable malevolence and cruelty falls short of the evil perpetrated by Mr. Mao in China. Despite the fact that conservative estimate put the number of those who died at the hand’s of Mao and his cohorts at 70 million, the Great Helmsman was not only praised by the radical left during his time in power, but continues to be viewed by many of these same leftist today, particularly in France and Europe, as a man whose ideology is inspiring, to be emulated and honored.
The land of the radical left truly knows no logic. Their unapologetic hatred of the US and the American people is in fact so deep that it brings many of its members to blindly support totalitarian regimes throughout the world, if only the regime in question is an enemy of the United States and “imperialism”. It is one thing to see Hugo Chavez embracing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran, quite another to hear members of the left applauding their union and working alliance. Have these utopian inspired leftist forgotten the fact that Iran’s government regularly tortures and murders dissidents, actively discriminates against women (the value of a women’s life in Iran is legally “half that of a man”) and persecutes homosexuals, non-Muslims and Jews?
The fact that Iran views the United States as its enemy and, moreover, that the Iranian leadership has called for the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state of Israel, the only functioning democracy in the entire Middle East, not only leads these leftist to turn a blind eye to the Ayatollahs disturbing human rights record but to keep silent on Ahmadinejad threatening pronouncements.
The same warped and twisted logic that rules the mind of radical leftist explains just why Ms. Walker, rather than celebrate and interpret the fact that Obama is receiving wide support from American whites as sign of decreased racism and as evidence of positive change in our land is instead led to describe our nation and the American people as “imperfect to the max, racist and sexist and greedy above all”.
Radical leftists, if truth be told, have seldom if ever been interested in defending democracy, liberal or otherwise, or in applauding changes brought about by peaceful democratic means. What radical leftists typically mean by “change” is violent radical change, preferably to be realized by revolution and upheaval and under the direction of a single leader or Master. It matters little whether the revolutionary Event unfolds in Havana or Tehran, or whether the leader then proceeds to establish a totalitarian regime that systematically violates the rights of its citizenry, as long as it’s anti-American, reasons the radical leftist: “sign me up!”
I offer these passing remarks as someone who identifies neither with the Left nor Right wing of the political spectrum and as an independent thinker who situates himself in the political middle, somewhere between the foolishness of Alice Walker and the knavery of a Rush Limbaugh. While there’s certainly plenty of stupidity and much to criticize about many of the ideas and arguments proposed by right wingers, the opinions being advanced today by members of the radical left serve to contravene the principles of the Enlightenment, indeed the very values that are central to our spiritual and religious traditions and that have served to shape our ideas of justice, fairness and goodness.
It is promising to see, however, that a number of intellectuals who have traditionally identified with the political left have begun to actively question the logic of some of their more radical comrades. The world’s most famous Continental philosopher writing today, the Marxist Slavoj Zizek, for example, has in the last few years taken active steps to expose and criticize what he pinpoints in his work as the troubling moral relativism of the left. My purpose here has been to offer a few analytic observations on this troubling trend and to respond to Alice Walker’s decision to link Barak Obama with Fidel Castro in the process. The logic of her argument not only defies common sense - for our sake let us all hope that it does - but presents us with clear and convincing evidence of why the left, to play on the title of Bernard-Henri Levy’s latest book, is today facing such dark times.
Mario L. Beira holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and is a Lacanian psychoanalyst. He has lectured nationally and internationally on psychoanalysis and is the author of the first comprehensive psychological study of Fidel Castro, scheduled to be published by Rodopi (Amsterdam) under the title Fidel Castro Ruz. A Psycho-Analytic Study. A Spanish language abridged version of his study was recently published by Verbum, an editorial house based in Madrid, Spain.
