Cold War’s feeble anachronism

The widely held belief that young Fidel Castro was a promising prospect for American major-league baseball was, as it turns out, apocryphal — the pre-Internet equivalent of what we now call urban legend.

That might, in historical hindsight, be a six-decade human tragedy. Or maybe some other revolutionary firebrand with an adequate mix of ambition and political force would have seen the opportunity to seize power just as Castro did when his “Barbudos” (bearded ones) sent Cuban President Fulgencio Batista fleeing from office over New Year 1959. There’s no way to know.

What we do know is that most Americans alive today — indeed, most of the people on the planet — do not remember a day when Fidel Castro, who died Friday at 90, did not cast his shadow over the island nation he “liberated” from one regime only to replace it with a far worse one — Soviet-style communism. He cut off Cuba’s heavy reliance on the economy of the U.S. for that of the U.S.S.R., never a good trade.

The government (if it can be called that) Castro installed in Cuba controlled the news media, the culture, the economy, the “justice” system. (As the Miami Herald reported, gays and long-haired young people were being imprisoned in work camps as late as the mid-1970s.)

Castro’s repression produced a half-century exodus of Cubans high and humble, most to this country — first professionals, executives, industrialists and other Cubans who could afford to get away in relative safety; then countless flotillas of refugees who risked, and often lost, their lives trying to reach our shores.

The airwaves Castro controlled would frequently be dominated by his own voice, often for hours: He once delivered a three-hour speech to 6-year-olds, and in 1968 he spoke for 12 hours straight.

Castro had a special relevance here: His political and military support for revolutionary regimes in countries such as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Colombia were instrumental in the dynamics that gave rise to the former U.S. Army School of the Americas.

And of course, he was at Ground Zero of what was (as far as most of us know) our closest approach to nuclear catastrophe — the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when the Soviet shipping of missiles and nuclear-capable bombers, and the buildup of 40,000 Soviet troops on the island, led to President John F. Kennedy’s brinksmanship facedown of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Even after the historic fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet communist “alliance” in 1989, Castro remained an antiquated holdout of a discredited system — the unyielding and unrepentant dictator of an aging population sagging under an old Soviet economy and old and collapsing infrastructure. He was, wrote the Herald’s Glenn Garvin, “the last communist, railing on the empty, decrepit street corner that Cuba became under his rule.”

Fidel Castro will occupy a prominent place in human history, no accurate chronicle of which will ever glorify him.

This story was originally published November 28, 2016 at 3:03 PM with the headline "Cold War’s feeble anachronism."