A Tale of Two Castros

For many progressives, it seems as though all you have to do to corrupt their sacrosanct tolerance is to implement single-payer healthcare. In their eulogization of a man who imprisoned and summarily executed his political dissidents, silenced the press and free expression, denied the Cuban people the ability to emigrate, sent homosexuals to internment camps and turned one of the most promising Latin nations into a ration-filled, socialist hell-hole, progressives have proven themselves wholly uncertain of the moral legacy of Fidel Castro.

Typically, all that it takes for progressives to adjudicate a person’s moral bankruptcy is to find that another feels that there is a connection between biology and gender. However, when one of the worst people of the 20th century expires, their idea of condemnation is calling the man “controversial.”

President Barack Obama’s idea of acknowledging Castro’s profound evil was to cryptically ambiguate his legacy, as he so often does, by stating that “[h]istory will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him.” Progressive darling Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada and golden calf of glorified gender studies conglomerates like Mic and Attn:, had the following to say, with “deep sorrow” and all of the moral clarity of a spoiled toddler:

“Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader… [and a] legendary revolutionary and orator… Mr. Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.

While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante’.”

Leaving aside the fallacious claim about healthcare, Trudeau’s assertion that “Mr. Castro’s … detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people” leads me to wonder whether or not Trudeau had the opportunity to ask the political dissidents sent to the firing squad whether they recognized “el Comandante’s” geniality.

The most disturbing aspect of Obama and Trudeau’s statements is the level of both men’s intelligence. Assuming that they are the least bit scholastic about Castro’s record, both Obama and Trudeau are readily aware that Castro told an interviewer in 1965 that “a homosexual could [never] embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him … a true Communist militant … [a] deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist should be.”

Words, of course, are one thing, but actions are quite another. On Great Britain’s PinkNews, an outlet that covers political, entertainment and religious news for the LGBT community in the UK and worldwide, Benjamin Butterworth detailed the experience of Cuban homosexuals under Castro. “Many received false telegrams telling them they had been called for military service and should appear at a chosen location,” Butterworth said, “where they would then be rounded into trains, trucks and buses and sent to the camps with little food or water.” For two world leaders who have no problem labeling every form of dissention from their political agendas as a manifestation of covert intolerance, racism, sexism and all types of unfounded character assassination, their inability to speak in clear terms about actual bigotry is dumbfounding.

It all stems, of course, from the progressive fetishization of single-payer healthcare. No human being could be morally bad who collectivized medicine, the logic goes. It is a healthcare system that, to quote Jay Nordlinger, senior editor of the National Review, patients must “bring their own bed sheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper.” Progressives view socialism and communism with a rogue edginess that appeals to their pubescent idealism; whatever pernicious moral calculus allows a college kid to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the communist murderer Che Guevara is the same one that fuels the embrace of all sorts of vile people in pursuit of socialistic policies.

So many college kids can yell, “Bush lied, people died!” in between hits of a bong, but are utterly unable to list even one of the execrable sins of Castro. If the leaders of the progressive movement adored by millennials continue to deal in the world of double standards, it seems that Castro will be laid in his tomb with no lessons learned by anyone outside of Cuba or those lucky enough to have bridged the Florida strait without being drowned by Castro’s gunfire.