Tentative Agenda

So the immortality of Fidel Castro is refuted: the communist tyrant is reported gravely ill, his brother now in control of Cuba.

In the short term we must put up with intellectuals and the press as they anthropomorphize and even apotheosize a thug who first subjugated and then deadened the Latinate island while forcing the United States, humiliated at the Bay of Pigs, to watch from across an absconder-strewn gulf.

In the long term America's electorate and representatives must again consider, respectively, whether there is a will to confront outright suffering within the nation's compass and, if so, what plans and forces are available to remove those who are culpable. Washington has generally offered two competing policies for Cuba: neglecting the Cuban people by ostracizing the totalitarian regime, the default, or engaging Castro himself — an alternative with about as many dividends as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's 2000 toast in Pyongyang to the ubiquity of Cult Kim. Nearly fifty years on, neither approach to Cuba is reasoned.

How about rhetorical and material encouragement given directly to public airwaves and Cuban liberals? East Europe could not have overturned Soviet dominion as it did had it not been for Reaganite succor. Or intervention? The United States armed forces recently deposed — in record time with little loss — a third-string, narcissistic strongman commanding a dictatorial rattletrap whose name, forever consigned to mug shot farce, was Manuel Noriega.

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