Editorial / The Great J ailer of the Caribbean
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL THE GREAT JAILER OF THE CARIBBEAN by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Sons and daughters of liberty, let us face up to it: Some dictators have more fun than others. Uncle Joe Stalin had many a gay...
...The sheer crackpottedness of the scheme was not even touched upon, not in the Times or anywhere else...
...For the rest of his stay he simply let himself go...
...Why indeed...
...Nor was it widely noted that the most impoverishing neocolonialism today is the neocolonialism that Fidel clamped down upon Cuba nearly 20 years ago -that is to say, the Soviet-backed neocolonialism that forces Cubans to stand in line waiting for life's essentials even as Fidel lavishly arms his military and sends it off to frustrate productivity throughout his beloved Third World...
...Think of it, from Cairo to Cape Town a vast tidy sea of all-electric bi-levels...
...Good old Fidel, one of Heaven's darlings...
...Streets near his residence were sealed off, thousands demonstrated, and the puckish Fidel went into seclusion, exasperating the pundits by his reticence and joshing the cops with hints that he might stay an additional five days, perhaps ten...
...Imagine keeping the members of America's fourth estate sober past 6:00 p.m...
...Uncle Joe Stalin had many a gay moment-especially when schmoozing with the Anglo duo-yet Papa Brezhnev is often morose and, with a few vodkas aboard, he bawls...
...All over America thousands of pols fell into the mulligrubs...
...It was Fidel's hour, and no one of consequence was boorish enough to ask who would distribute this $300 billion or how it might reach the poor...
...And Fidel glowed...
...The ability to wipe out a village before breakfast or to send whole populations to extermination camps does not in and of itself put wings to the spirit of a dictator...
...The awe has endured, as Fidel Adapted from RET's Monday Column in the Washington Post...
...This was Fidel's greatest hour...
...It took 48 cars to get him in from the airport...
...When the pols finally laid hands on the text of his mischievous address their unease intensified...
...Why didn't I think of that...
...Or 30,000 hospitals with 18 million beds...
...He monopolized at least three security forces and cost New York City police nearly one hundred thousand dollars in daily overtime pay...
...and hungry and away from the toilet...
...For some it was a sad night...
...The Gringo Colossus must end its senseless arms race and feed the world's poor, Fidel said with a wink...
...He called in two idiot American congressmen and fussed with them over the Caribbean machinations of the war-like Jimmy...
...Or 60 million "comfortable" homes for 300 million people...
...To derive amusement from his work, a dictator needs something more, and history counsels that at least one of the indis-pensables for a happy dictator is a good working relationship with the journalists and the pols of the Free World...
...Six hundred thousand schools could be built for educating 400 million children...
...This was Fidel at the height of his powers-a dictator of the highest standards, but one who knows how to enjoy a volupt laugh...
...Soon the hoots and the hee-haws were resounding through the great hall...
...there was even a visionary plan for spending the boodle...
...customs officials...
...Hence, when Fidel came to New York in October he was abrim with confidence and as full of fun as a capitalist from Kansas anticipating the massage parlors of Times Square...
...In it Fidel had preempted them at every turn...
...He harangued the United Nations General Assembly for four and one-half hours and returned to Cuba leaving behind a hush of awe...
...In 1960 he came to the United States wearing green fatigue clothes and what appeared to be pole-climbing boots...
...Israel has committed "the most terrible crime of our time," he sang...
...and never did he mention the arms expenditures of his friends the Soviets, expenditures which now exceed America's by 25-45 percent...
...All these renowned jefes had more power than any Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare ever to prowl the earth, yet how many were really happy...
...I join Senator McGovern in saluting him...
...Castro, at U.N., Asks Rich Nations to Give $300 Billion to Help Poor," a New York Times headline solemnly declared...
...Irrepressibly wearing the same fatigue ensemble (now starched) and chomping on his cigar, he promptly got into an amusing row with U.S...
...Nor did anyone of consequence point out that those poor most desperately in need of aid happen to be the Indochinese victims of good old Fidel's ideological kin...
...At 32 he was given a whole nation to abuse, once he had sent his predecessor packing and shot or incarcerated tens of thousands of the indigenous disciples of the Chamber of Commerce...
...Any dictator gifted in putting on these eminences always has a laugh readily available, and down in Havana there resides one of the gayest dictators of all...
...And so Fidel demanded that Japan and the Western powers cough up $300 billion, and off he went to savor the evening news...
...In one stunning oration Fidel anticipated every forward-looking utterance Walter Mondale might make until well into the 1990s...
...Mussolini sang in the bath, but Adolph was a grim fellow and, if the shrinks are to be believed, no Aryan burgher would have wanted his daughter with the Fiihrer after dark...
...With a stupefying coterie of thugs and cut-ups, he moved into a Harlem hotel and there plucked chickens...
...Fidel was having a grand old time, and he saved his most ribald deviltry for last...
...And as a final caprice he hastily called a dinner party for a band of American media eminences wherein he scrimped on the booze, hid the food, and denied access to the privy until well after 11:00 p.m...
...knows very well...
...He held yet another soiree for some of the Third World brethren...
...The headline was typical, and Fidel must have been prodigiously amused...
...they fretted...
...That Fidel relished the joke became instantly manifest...
...Then he trundled over to the United Nations and wowed a packed house with a diatribe about neo-colonialists, Zionists, imperialists- in sum, all the phantasmagorias that so easily set teeth to grinding at the world center for institutionalized brotherhood...
...After all, he has regularly been visited by America's constituency of conscience, and the Congressional Record is one of the perks available to men of his high estate...
...America's "repressive maneuvers" to maintain "the colonial status of Puerto Rico" must end, he admonished...
...Fidel's amusement was complete...
...Right there in the cultural capital of the great liberal democracy good old Fidel inquired: "Why should some be miserably poor so that others may be exaggeratedly rich...
...In the middle of Manhattan, with the tape running and the hot lights upon him, the Great Jailer of the Caribbean had performed a near-perfect impersonation of an American goody-goody progressive...
Vol. 12 • December 1979 • No. 12
