Here's a news flash for Rep. Charles Rangle, D-N.Y., and the hundreds of business leaders and others who feted Fidel Castro like a hero last month in New York City: The Cuban leader is still a ruthless despot.
That's the conclusion of Carl-Johan Groth, a United Nations human rights investigator. He was appointed to the post in 1992 but has yet to be granted access to Cuba.The island nation, he said, still is a place chock-full of serious civil and political rights violations, where 10 percent of the population is in exile and where hundreds of thousands are in prison. Political pluralism and freedoms of speech and association are forbidden. No one dares speak out against the dictator.
Groth also praised a new Cuban willingness to examine economic policies critically, but that hardly makes up for mass torture.
Most people didn't need this ton of bricks to fall on their heads. Cuba looks like a politically oppressive duck, and it quacks like one, too. That makes one wonder why some people insist it is a swan.
Rangle, who ironically was a champion in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, sat on the dais with Castro as he spoke to a cheering crowd at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. The business leaders, including such men as David Rockefeller, invited the dictator to lunch.
Naturally, the business leaders were doing their best to get a foot in the door as financially desperate Cuba opens its markets. But they are ignoring certain historical realities. Capitalism might indeed help the oppressed, but absolute dictators aren't about to let prosperity spread to the general populous, not with its attendant "evils" of education and economic power.
As for Rangle and the others, one can only guess as to why they acted as they did last month, or why they view the torture and denial of rights to Cubans so differently from apartheid.
Some day, when freedom is restored and Cubans are allowed to tell their horror stories, Rangle and the rest can explain to them why the bearded, fatigue-clad dictator was such a great guy.