Sometimes history doesn’t have to wait to judge — and when it comes to dictators, even dead ones, we shouldn’t either.
With news of Fidel Castro’s death Friday — finalmente — world leaders began offering eulogies, some of which were so vapid or willfully ignorant that Castro might have written them himself. It would appear that the 20th-century’s quintessential “Big Brother” managed to infect a few world leaders with an Orwellian strain of mushy-mouthed aphasia.
Apparently bereft of the right words, they treated Castro’s brutality as polite unmentionables, serving up platitudes as though just another important figure had passed on to his maker.
Did they miss the screams?
Growing up in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis, running bomb shelter drills and hearing the stories of refugees who became lifelong friends, I somehow managed to evade the charms of the revolutionary rogue, who merely replaced one dictatorship with another far worse. There’s nothing sentimental about a ruthless dictator who once held the world hostage to a possible nuclear Armageddon.