It's not as simple as "Castro was an evil dictator".

[Ken Burch]

45. In my experience, yes.

Most of the time, I've seen it used to mock and silence anti-Trump voices online...usually by the sorts who call people "special snowflakes" and who say shit like "suck it up, buttercup!".

And I didn't say anything in that sentence that deserved to be called bullshit.

I was involved in Amnesty International at one point and took part in urgent actions in support of Cuban dissidents. I opposed Castro's treatment of gays(although, in fairness, he came around on that a lot faster than the US government did in the same era).

It's just that any time human rights issues got tied into the Cold War(let's face it-the ONLY reason the US ever criticized Cuba on human rights was that it was allied, on fairly legitimate defensive grounds, with the Soviet Union-especially after we launched a completely unprovoked and unjustified invasion against them in 1961-and because their economy was socialist. If they had been capitalist and "pro-American", no one in this country would ever have questioned anything they'd have done to suppress dissent, and we all know it) any sincere concern about anyone being oppressed vanished. It all turned into sanctimonious "Darkness At Noon" melodrama-about points-scoring in a pointless "conflict"-and none of it actually freed anybody. Other than Solzhenitsyn-and he then used his freedom to do nothing but denounce democracy, lash out at Jewsm and support Vladimir Putin and his campaign to create a Pan-Slavic Orthodox empire.

Even worse, the "freedom and democracy" that came to Eastern Europe brought nothing but massive inequality, crushing poverty and the rebirth of antisemitic right-wing "Christian" nationalism. Other than in the Czech Republic, nothing progressive or positive happened in the lands of "ex-communism" at all. Property rights never brought freedom in any real sense. Poland and Hungary are now permanently fascist, the all-but-fascist AfD is surging in support in unified Germany, and all that can ever happen anywhere in that region is greater bigotry and more virulent nationalism. All other possibilities there are dead.

That's the only thing that can ever happen in Cuba if we keep insisting on "defeating communism" there. Our leaders will makre sure no good possibilities are allowed there, just as they did in Eastern Europe after 1989.

I don't mourn the pre-1989 regimes, but we certainly turned out to be totally wrong in the belief that NOTHING could ever be worse than "godless communism". We should have regarded Marxist-Leninism as simply another bad system. We of "the West" should never have put "defeating the 'Red Menace'" above anything and everything else in life-and we should never have made it not only a war against Marxist-Leninism but against ANY alternative to capitalism at all.

We could learn from this.

We could renounce the whole practice of forcing austerity on the world in exchange for loans and debt restructuring. We could put pressure on the lending agencies NOT to demand layoffs, wage cuts, benefit cuts, cuts in social spending and tax cuts for corporations in exchange for assistance. We could apologize to everyone in Eastern Europe that we immiserated through "shock therapy" and to Mikhail Gorbachev for humiliating him and discrediting his government in repayment for his agreeing to do everything we ever asked of him. We could agree that we would never do to Cuba what we did to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

But our leaders will never do that.

They don't want to create a just and stable world. They just want to be able to say "We Won! We Won!"

And they don't care how much worse that insistence makes the world, how much instability and war that insistence on "winning" causes, how many future wars it causes, how many jihadis and Putins it creates.

Our leaders all have a chronic case of what "Vince Lombardi Syndrome"-the primary symptom of which is the belief that "winning isn't everything-it's the ONLY thing".

And it will always end up leaving us with "Fourth down and Vietnam".