In Castro's Corner - African Americans' alleged affinity for Cuba

National Review, March 6, 2000 by Jay Nordlinger

Above all, though, there is the belief--as fixed as it is false--that Castro has been good for black Cubans, that his takeover from Fulgencio Batista, the right-wing dictator who preceded him in power, meant a kind of emancipation for a previously shackled population. As Roger Wilkins puts it, with understatement, "Castro talks a better game on race than Batista." Batista, however, was himself partly black, and contemned by the Cuban upper crust because of it. He may have been no Harry Truman, but he opened up the army for people like himself. Castro, in contrast, has created a nomenklatura that is as pale as he is. Even Charlie Rangel, his eye ever on the prize of affirmative action, said recently, "I've been giving Cuba's officials hell because I don't see enough African-Cubans [in government]--but they've improved a great deal."

One final thing pervades the thinking of black elites about Cuba: fear of the end of Castro's rule, and of a freer, more capitalist Cuba, with hordes of white-skinned reactionaries streaming back from Miami. Assata Shakur, naturally, is worried: "If the U.S. succeeds in destroying the revolution, my status will be like that of most Cubans: I'll be up a creek without a paddle. It will be devastating for people worldwide who believe in justice." Jesse Jackson, though, trying to keep hope alive, has cautioned that "no one should suppose that when Fidel leaves the scene, all the revolution's handiwork will vanish with him... The decades have formed a generation of Cubans--through almost universal schooling, through universal health care, through doctors and teachers dispatched to desperate reaches of the world, through military missions against the likes of South Africa, through long moral purpose and conditionings--that will not easily be separated from that experience." Even so, "some rightist elements of the Cuban-American community [hope] to inherit the ruins after an apocalypse there. We simply cannot allow the policy of the United States to become captured by such ambitions."

If Castro ever does bid farewell, there will be rejoicing in many places, foremost in his prisons. But there will be mourning too--and none more heartfelt than in a segment of the American Left that has never stopped swooning over him, and that will fight with him till the last trump.