History Has Absolved Him...at least for now

I've been wrestling with the question of how we've gotten to this point. When I was young, the American public might have been prejudiced against Hispanics, but they all knew that the Castro regime was bad. Actually, the ignorance I occasionally dealt with had to do with strangers finding out I was Cuban and saying, "Oh, so you like Fidel." Yes, dope, that's why I live in the United States, I would think.

But somewhere along the way, Fidel got absolved, his victims vilified, and historical fact and context forgotten. Read any comment section under an article dedicated to Cuba, and you will see just how ignorant much of the American public has become. How has it happened?I'd like to propose one reason is that historians have let us down. It is these scholars who write the history books, these history books that educate the generations of Americans. Ask any Cuban American who's sat in a college history class where the subject matter has even the most tangential connection to Cuba what that experience is like. There is nothing like being told that the world is flat and having to sit there in silence, or worse yet, being labeled crazy, stupid, or immoral for insisting it is round.

It would be easy enough to say, "Oh, it's because they are all commie pinkos." And that may well be, but in my experience scholars are well-intentioned, attempting to convey what they see as the truth. Unfortunately historical truth has a context. It is that context that has been lost.

It has been lost because whole generations of scholars and citizens see Cuba with a distorted and, sorry to say, biased frame of reference. They start out with the presupposition that Cuba was an undeveloped and impoverished country. In that context, they see marvelous literacy, health care, etc... What they do not see and what Cuban Exiles and those born in the United States have to work tirelessly to convey is that by almost any quality of life measure, preCastro Cuba had one of the highest literacy rates, lowest child mortality rates, etc., certainly in Latin America. It was not called the "Pearl of the Antilles" for nothing. But beyond that many comparisons have to be made to Europe rather than the developing world.

I do not intend to maintain that it was a perfect society, but what I do intend to propose is that Castroite propaganda aside, any analysis that does not take into account statistics both before and after the Castro dictatorship in context is fatally flawed. And once both sets of statistics are analyzed, the regime is incontrovertibly a failed one.

I look forward to the day when the regime collapses and the truth circulates freely. Then history will vindicate me and the thousands like me out here in the wilderness.