Fidel Castro is dead. To
say those words is so strange. I’ve never known a moment when he wasn’t alive.
Castro came to power seven
years before I was born, and I’m almost 50. I’ve been lecturing on the man
every fall semester for 20 years, spending two or three weeks on him, his
ideology, and the beautiful country he destroyed. It’s ironic that the day he
died I finished two long chapters on him for a book manuscript, and a family
friend (whose mother escaped Cuba) visiting for Thanksgiving just happened to
ask how much longer I thought the 90-year-old despot might continue to live.
The answer, it turned out, was a mere few hours more.
What to say in a few hundred words about a man like Fidel Castro at his
death? Where to start? Where to end?
I think the answer is easy: The focus on Castro at his death must be just
that: Castro and death. First, there’s the death he was responsible for since
seizing Cuba in January 1959, and then, second, there are the incalculable
millions more who would have died — not just in Cuba but in America and
worldwide — had he gotten his way in October 1962.
So, for starters how many
people were killed by Fidel and his communist dystopia?
Unfortunately, no one truly
knows, akin to how no one knows how many poor souls he tossed into his jails,
from political dissidents to priests to homosexuals. Fidel’s prison-state has
never permitted human-rights observers, reminiscent of how he never permitted
the elections he repeatedly promised in the 1950s. That said, many sources have
tried to pin down numbers and have generated some common estimates:
The Black Book of Communism, the seminal Harvard
University Press work, which specialized in trying to get accurate data on the
enormous volume of deaths produced by communist tyrants, states that in the
1960s alone, when Fidel and
his brother Raul (Cuba’s current leader) established their complete control,
with the help of their murdering buddy Che Guevara, an estimated 30,000 people
were arrested in Cuba for political reasons and 7,000 to 10,000 were believed
to have been executed. Even then, that was merely the start.
From the late 1950s to the late
1990s, it’s estimated that Castro killed between 15,000 to 18,000 people,
whether victims of long-term imprisonment or outright execution by bullets.
That is a lot of people for
a small island. And it isn’t all.
Cuba is a surreal island of
no boats, where boats are banned — because people with boats flee. Thus, untold
numbers of citizens have attempted the treacherous nearly 100-mile swim to
Florida in shark-infested waters. An estimated 100,000 have risked the journey. Of those, perhaps as many
as 30,000 to 40,000 died from drowning. As they bob for breath, the Castro
government sends military helicopters to drop large bags of sand on them from
high above.
Yes, actually drop sandbags
on them.
So, Fidel Castro is
responsible for a lot of death.
But here, too, these
numbers do not capture the level of Fidel’s brutal madness. Consider the actual millions he
badly wanted to kill, especially here in America.
If Fidel Castro had his way in
October 1962, the United States would have been leveled by atomic bombs and so
would little Cuba, which would’ve ceased to exist. The fact is that Fidel
recommended to Nikita Khrushchev that Cuba and the USSR together launch an
all-out nuclear attack upon the United States, literally igniting Armageddon.
This is no secret. Castro
admitted it. In an open forum discussing the Cuban Missile Crisis 30 years
later, Castro told Robert McNamara, JFK’s secretary of defense: “Bob, I did
recommend they [the nuclear missiles] were to be used.”
In total, said McNamara,
there were 162 Soviet missiles on the island. The firing of those missiles
alone would have led to (according to McNamara) at least 80 million dead
Americans, which would have been half the population, plus added tens of
millions of casualties.
That, however, is a
conservative estimate, given that 162 missiles was far the sum total that would
have been subsequently launched. The United States in turn would have launched
on Cuba, and also on the USSR. President Kennedy made that commitment clear in
his nationally televised speech on October 22, 1962: “It shall be the policy of
this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation
in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United
States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” In
response, of course, the Soviets would have automatically launched on America
from Soviet soil. Even then, the fireworks would just be starting: Under the
terms of their NATO and Warsaw Pact charters, the territories of Western and
Eastern Europe would also erupt.
Once the smoke cleared,
hundreds of millions to possibly over a billion people could have perished,
with Western civilization in its death throes. If Fidel Castro had gotten his
way, he would have precipitated the greatest slaughter in human history. (Che
Guevara also wanted to launch the nukes.)
The Soviets were horrified.
Their ambassador to Cuba, Alexander Alekseyev, was so stunned at what Castro
told him that he stood frozen, speechless, crushed. Without waiting for an
answer from the numb ambassador, Castro started writing his feelings on paper,
which Alekseyev saw as a kind of “last testament, a farewell.”
Fidel was ready to go — go
up in a giant mushroom cloud for Marxism. As McNamara learned, this was Fidel’s
big chance to die as a “martyr” for Marxism-Leninism. He was ready to “pull the
temple down on his head.”
A shocked Nikita Khrushchev
realized he was dealing with madmen. Khrushchev’s son Sergei, in his
three-volume biography of his father, said that the Soviet general secretary
huddled with top officials in the “code room” of the Foreign Ministry late on a
Sunday night and repeatedly ordered, “Remove them, and as quickly as possible.”
Khrushchev urged Andrei
Gromyko to instantly get in touch with Washington in order “to save the world
from those pushing us toward war.”
As for Fidel, he was
“furious” with Khrushchev. “Castro was mortally offended,” recorded Sergei. “He
had not managed to engage in a fight with the Americans. He had made up his
mind to die a hero, and to have it end that way.” He had been ready to “die
beautifully,” as one Soviet official put it. Denied his glorious opportunity,
he now considered Khrushchev “a traitor.”
Thankfully, the world averted nuclear war, through the
leadership of Khrushchev and Kennedy, and no thanks to bloodthirsty lunatics
like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, who were ready to blow up the world in the
name of their Marxist-Leninist nightmare.
This, alas, was Fidel
Castro. And for the record (and not surprisingly), not a word of it is found in
the awful press release by President Barack
Obama acknowledging Castro’s death, a statement that Marco Rubio rightly called
“pathetic,” with “no mention of [the] thousands
he killed & imprisoned.”
Pathetic, indeed.
Fidel Castro is dead. And
death was Fidel Castro.
