No, Jesse, no - Jesse Helms' Cuba boycott legislation - Column

National Review, April 17, 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Senator Helms has withdrawn his rider on the defense bill, but he promises that the measure will be reintroduced, and we ought at least to know what we are up to. The measure is designed to tighten the hold on Castro's Cuba and goes so far as to forbid the importation of agricultural products from any country that buys Cuban sugar.

For the record (as the tergiversators usually begin), I have probably minted as many anti-Castro columns, speeches, articles, and books as anyone else alive. I think it important to say about Castro that he is a genuinely evil man, probably a sadist, certainly someone whose tortures, even of former companions, make for reading as lurid as the autobiography of Armando Valladares, who described his 22 years in prison for the offense of questioning his old comrade's judgment on some matter or another.

There'd have been plenty of justification over the years for launching an armed invasion of Cuba to replace Castro. The Bay of Pigs venture should have been forcefully backed by the government that initiated it. The series of exploding cigars and poisoned wet-suits we sent to Cuba (Operation Mongoose) makes the stuff of opera bouffe, but the idea was in context defensible; when the nuclear missiles arrived in Cuba the consensus within the JFK White House was in favor of a military operation.

But in those days Cuba was a salient of a global effort to stamp out freedom all over the world and to terrorize the United States into submission to Moscow.

That has ended. Fidel Castro is now simply the bloody curator of a museum still running the old Marxist - Leninist script. The result is the protraction of very considerable suffering by ten million Cubans. Senator Helms, whose judgments are normally dead-on, advises us that his hope is that his boycott ``will hasten an end to the brutal Castro dictatorship and make Cuba free once more.'' Well yes. There is the problem that boycotts of this kind don't seem to work. Four years ago heavy thinkers on the geopolitical front were begging Mr. Bush not to move against Saddam Hussein -- we should give the boycotts a chance to work . . . No country was ever more thoroughly boycotted than Albania under Hoxha, who died in his bed. As did Kim Il Sung. But respecting all these countries, we were armed with the defensive license that permits, indeed encourages, strenuous activity on all fronts. But -- again -- the Cold War is over. North Korea presents the special challenge of nuclear mischief; but Cuba does not.

It is ironic that the Helms measure would impose penalties on trading with Cuba that we never dared to impose on our allies who, pretty soon after the Cold War began, started in trading with the Soviet Union. When the Marshall Plan was established, Senator James Kem of Missouri proposed a rider I'd have voted for at the time, and so would Jesse Helms, namely: No country trading with the Soviet Union would qualify for American aid. What happened was 1) the Kem Amendment was defeated; 2) our European allies proceeded to trade with Moscow; and 3) pretty soon we joined in and merrily traded with the country dedicated to our destruction.

People ask: When do you think Castro will go down? That was first heard soon after the Berlin Wall came down. That was six years ago. If Castro is significantly weaker today, it is because his vital organs are aging. He finds no difficulty whatever in sublimating the impoverishment of the Cuban people in the name of his own majestic survival.

Oh God how fine it would be to see him arrested and tried by a Cuban court and then just plain shot, assuming Cuban executioners would have the time to train to shoot without first torturing. Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who represents a heavily Cuban-American district in South Florida, comments on the Helms amendment, ``These measures have been effective and successful, and it would be wrong to do away with them.''

They have not been successful. Meanwhile, Castro has become no more effective an enemy of the United States than Papa Doc Duvalier was. Huffing and puffing about bringing him down is sheer onanism, and we should be too grown up for that business.