ANOTHER DARK DAY

I still think of Elian (Nat Hentoff, Jewish World Review)

As soon as Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, I saw on television the firing squad execution of an array of political prisoners, which he ordered. He then began filling his brutal prisons with Cubans whose sole crime was a desire to breathe freedom after the Batista dictatorship -- only to find themselves in another totalitarian quicksand.

At one point, interviewing the already legendary Che Guevara -- an international Cuban revolutionary icon -- at the Cuban mission to the United Nations, I asked him if he could foresee, anytime in the future, free elections in Cuba. Crisply dressed in his military outfit, Guevara burst out laughing at my callow naivete.

Having interviewed Cubans who survived Castro's gulags, I have never understood or respected the parade of American entertainers, politicians and intellectuals who travel to Cuba to be entranced by this ruthless dictator who, for me, has all the charisma of a preening thug, akin to any killer on "The Sopranos."

These Castro-philes are among those who discredit liberalism because they're unable to recognize and be repelled by unbridled evil. Consider Steven Spielberg, who has developed impressive resources through his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to keep alive the horrifying presence of the Holocaust. Yet, as quoted in the April 11 Wall Street Journal, Spielberg described his audience with Castro last November as "the eight most important hours of my life."

Was Spielberg's life that barren until those gloriously transcendent hours with the chief warden of Cuba's prisons?

From time to time, I still think of Elian Gonzalez, so vivid a free spirit here until condemned by Janet Reno and Bill Clinton to a land where schoolteachers must keep a record of any signs of their charges' lessening fealty to the relentless light of their lives.

At least Elian will be alive in a couple years when Cuba is a democracy again, one way or another. I think of his mother, who died that he might have a better life right then. In an administration not exactly filled with high points, the day they seized him to restore him to slavery was a particularly low one. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 30, 2003 1:36 PM