Castro’s Mortality

The following is excerpted from William F. Buckley, Jr.’s comments published on October 17, 2003, Internet News, in response to President Bush’s October 10 remarks.

Announcing his new initiatives in the matter of dealing with Cuba, President Bush proclaimed that "no tyrant can stand forever against the power of liberty." Mr. Bush must have been making a biological point. Fidel Castro is not going to live forever . . . A mortal development here would not make his death a triumph of U.S. foreign policy. . . .

What Mr. Bush did, on Oct. 10, was to announce, or rather to re-emphasize, three policies. There would be a commission set up to assist a Free Cuba . . .

Bush will more strictly enforce travel restrictions to guard against American entrepreneurs going to Cuba to do business, or Americans going there as tourists.

And Bush will continue to attempt to devise ways to get Cubans seeking refuge from Castro entry to the United States without requiring them to "risk their lives at sea." . . . Castro reacted to the Bush initiatives in a characteristic way. . . . These policies, said the official Communist Party daily, Granma, "have an electoral stink" that shows "the unlimited commitment of the American government to the extreme right and its obsessions with destroying the Cuban Revolution’s example."

Now analysts of the political situation can’t discount the whole of such condemnations of U.S. policy simply because they issue from Castro and his retinue. Mr. Bush’s reiteration of the same old thing in respect of our treatment of Cuba can’t be attributed to fundamental U.S. attitudes toward tyrannical governments. If this were so, we would not have permitted trade with the Soviet Union during 30 long years before that tyranny ended. The tyranny in China shows no sign whatever of ending and does not, there, depend on the longevity of a single person. Mao has been dead for a long time, and we are into the fourth generation of tyrannical successions. U.S. policy urges trade with Vietnam, a tyranny we fought, in living memory, not by restricting tourist visas to Hanoi, but by dispatching 500,000 American soldiers to shoot North Vietnamese Communists and their sympathizers. . . .

[U. S. policies toward] China and Vietnam evolved, but not policies toward Cuba, even though the worldwide threat of which Cuba was once a salient no longer exists. Why? Do those policies have something to do with "an electoral stink"?

Well, yes. Minority exertions on foreign policy tend to have extortionate effects. This is true of Jewish-American influence on Mideast policy, of Hispanic-American influence on immigration policy, of Cuban American influence on Cuba policy.

There is, in this case, something of national pride also at work. We have been terribly humiliated by Castro for 40 years. We tried to invade his country and failed. We tried to assassinate him and failed. . . . .

But U.S. pride, brandished in Little Havana policy, doesn’t make sense. . . .